


Loss, Act II

by missclairebelle



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, F/M, Tags are hard on this one okay?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2019-06-10 13:38:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 27
Words: 90,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15292701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: It’s funny how words spoken in the heat of a moment –– a thousand small throwaway noises –– become the brain’s constant refrain when it feels like the world is ending. When a perfect life starts to feel like a flash in the pan, and too good to last, all of the beauty fades away. All that remains are regret (why did I…?) and a longing so acute it feels as though body and mind are being cleaved in two (just give me time enough for “sorry”).





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second multi-part installment of the Loss universe. There's an entire history between these two both in that story and in a series of ficlets that are also posted on AO3. <3 Happy reading.

##  **Loss: Act II  
** Part One  
November 2018 

It’s funny how words spoken in the heat of a moment –– a thousand small throwaway noises –– become the brain’s constant refrain when it feels like the world is ending. When a perfect life starts to feel like a flash in the pan, and too good to last, all of the beauty fades away. All that remains are regret ( _why did I…?_ ) and a longing so acute it feels as though body and mind are being cleaved in two ( _just give me time enough for “sorry”_ ).

This is how we got there, ninety-six hours ago. 

It was a fitting place to start, back in the same situation that first brought us together. We were attending a fundraiser for the new pediatric oncology wing at the hospital –– lots of people who carried many zeroes in their bank account balances with their pocketbooks loosened by booze.

Neither of us were exempted from the pull of a mother’s speech about how the hospital helped her son.  We allowed ourselves to be plied with champagne and Jamie wrote a check from our joint account large enough that it made me feel like I had taken a punch to the stomach. As he wrote the payable line out, he said, “It’s fine. Aye?”

“Of course,” responded, curling my fingers over his shoulder and touching the back of his rapidly reddening ear. _I just knew_ _._

In the memo line he wrote a confirmation of what I suspected: _For Willie_.

I squeezed his shoulder after he wrote it.

Jamie was trembling just slightly as he tore the check off of the checkbook and slid it and the silver Montblanc pen into his breast pocket.  

“It’s goin’ to be a good place, right? For families, bairns, kids?”

“Yes.”

The far off look on his face faded when he turned to look at me, and it made my heart quicken for just a moment.  And I had kissed him, softly at first, until his fingers were alive again and his mouth was working.  He teased, “Ol’ ball ‘n chain want ta dance?”  

We _had_ then, laughing and sipping whisky.  I squealed when he put down his glass and dipped me. I blushed one of the department chairs complimented me. Jamie thought “ _that blush_ ” was uproariously funny.  Maneuvering me to the perimeter of the room where, and true to his form from the first night we were together, he made the blush burn until I ached. ****

As the night devolved, I ended up bent at the waist over my desk, my forearms supporting my weight. Jamie’s hands were on my hips, holding my dress up. A pile of papers of _God knows_ what origin had fallen prey to my curling fingers, wrinkling and crunching in my fist as he explored.

“Christ, I want ye even more now that we’re marrit.”

Jamie’s voice was caught somewhere in the ether between a growl and a groan –– a rumbling from the very core of him versus a noise from his belly.

“I’m going to ‘ave…”

 _A gasp._ One of us, maybe both of us, a sound that hung in the air buzzing over the pandemonium of the party a few floors down.

He began again: “Imma ‘ave… marrit people sex wi’ the woman I love.”

I turned to look over my shoulder, curls falling over my face where I allowed them to rest against flushed skin. Up and through eyelashes, a look of such clear intent I could feel it burning at the back of my eyes, I corrected him: “I’m bent over a desk, Fraser. _Nothing_ about this will be _‘married people sex.’_ ”

“I dinna ken why ye canna accept the _literal_ meaning of _anythin’_.”  

He was breathy as he took exception to my commentary.

“Other than the fact that we’re marrit people, there’s no’… oh God….”

Jamie had dissolved from my consciousness entirely. He became a source of sensation only. Bruises blossomed on my hips beneath his fingertips. A hot burst of purple and black that would remind me of this moment and mark my flesh while he was apart from me. Something was coiling in some part of my body –– a place I could not identify.

_A work benefit.  An expensive cocktail dress.  A suit coat and a kilt._

All those years ago, before so many losses and quiet moments of a relationship building, we had just been two single people who had been joined together _again and again_.

Seemingly by fate, we had stumbled to his flat from a gala.

And then kept faltering like a colt on freshly-born and still-sticky legs to get our footing.  ( _I did most of the faltering, as Jamie just stared and waited.)_

The setting was different ( _my office rather than the entryway to his bachelor pad_ ), but we were back where _it_ ( _we)_ began.

And this time, it was not just formal attire that we shared.

 _Two wedding rings_.

The curve the metal on his left ring finger was cool over the bruise he just extracted from my flesh.

My wedding band was just inches from my face and I could not keep my eyes off of it.

It had not been six months yet and I still found myself looking at the ring and contentedly thinking: “ _married?_ yes… _married_ … to Jamie.”  The thought tipped me over the precipice, friction abating only momentarily as he pulled out and turned me. My fingers raked down his clothed back as he reentered me. He was humming in my ear, stilling.

Afterwards, Jamie cleaned us both up with an almost apologetic, fluttering touch.  He was tentative somehow. Stammering and gentle with the box of wet wipes I kept in my desk, he traced the lines of my body before helping situate the black silk organza back down to my knees.

“You’re being strange.” I could not help the remark from coming out of me as turned and sat on the desk. Legs falling apart before I drew him towards me by his freshly-buckled belt, I reveled in the smooth, cool material of his kilt on my thighs.

“I got ye good, Sassenach.”  His broad hand rested over the fabric at my hip. My skin seemed to pulsate under his palm. It would ache, to be sure, but in that delicious way that would remind me of him.

“You did,” I confirmed and tipped my head to the side. We had long since established that I did not mind a little evidence left on my body and just thinking about it made my stomach clench. “My shoulder blade, too. I can _feel_ that little bite turning into _something_. I’m all marked up… a mess really.”

“Ye’re _just fine_ when ye’re freshly loved. Better than fine really. _Perfect_.”

I sighed when he kissed me, slow and gentle. My eyes fluttered shut, an unconscious reaction to the sensation of his mouth on me.  There was not enough time in existence for me to lose the butterflies in my stomach when he kissed me like that, as if he was using his mouth to pour his essence into me.

When he pulled back, my lips perfectly swollen and aching for more, I mumbled, “I’m going to miss you.  Do you need to go?”

“I need to go,” he confirmed, fingers in the hair he had asked me to wear down for the evening. “It’s important stuff, Sassenach, helpin’ the American side of the firm learn how to sell more Reeboks than Nikes.”

“I thought Americans were the ones with the corner on the sneaker advertising market.”

He quirked one ruddy eyebrow, examining my face with his head tipped back. He was apparently waiting to see if what I said would be a plea for him to stay ( _no –– not going to beg_ ) or some sort of remark that he would find, in equal measure, infuriating and charming ( _yes –– I would opt for feistiness_ ).

“What’s that you’ve said?” I asked, pausing for a moment before putting on my best approximation of humble Jamie. “ _Ye’re but a wee… nay, **humble** peddler of whisky_.”

A short burst of giggles fell from my lips as he ran rapid, grumbling kisses from the corner of my mouth over my cheeks, down my jawline and onto my throat.

“Can ye imagine how good it’ll feel to see each other again, though?” he tried, failing to make me feel much better about the separation. In a put-on American accent, he answered his own question, “ _Explosive stuff, babe_.”

“ _Two weeks_ , and if you come back saying a bunch of tripe like ‘babe,’ we will need to seriously reevaluate this marriage thing.”

Hands cupping the back of my neck, he gave me a solitary kiss on the forehead.  With his mouth hovering just over mine, his voice was a whisper from my lips and serious.  “I could call ye ‘ _Pumpkin_ ’ and I dinna ken that ye’d ever seriously reevaluate this marriage thing.”

“Huh uh.” I sighed a little, moving for his lips as he pulled back, one corner of his lips quirked up.   _Self-satisfied, rutting bastard._

“But aye, fourteen days is a hell of a long time.”  He studied me, face first before his eyes drifted down.  “I intend to take ye home now and make the most of the time we have wit’ each other. Is that alright?”

“Better than.”

We had a plan then; a plan that stretched two weeks into the future. Jamie would keep me awake with my toes curling into the mattress until fingers of orange and pink sunlight tickled the horizon and signaled it was time for his departure. He would take his two-week trip where the most dramatic thing to happen was some lost luggage; we would probably do things over webcams that were illegal in some countries and talk at odd intervals during our days.

 _But the plan did not go off like that_.

And so I will always remember:

_The strength of his hand cupping my waist as I got off of the desk and stumbled in my heels, legs still like gelatin. Before I could take another step (one that would likely stretch and tear the ligaments in my ankle), his fingers splayed over me, steadying me.  Leaning against the desk before: “Ye alright then, Sassenach?” I wiggled my toes, flexed my feet, and I nodded, thankful I had not sprained something.  He said something, a light-hearted and tender comment, that I would come to wish like hell I could remember._

It was the last truly tender moment we had together before he left.  

Because the night went south once we returned to the party.  And things from there tested my resolve in a way I had never thought possible –– that night and after he left for Los Angeles. 


	2. Part Two

##  **Loss: Act II  
Part Two**  **  
**

I was not ready to say goodbye when Jamie left for Los Angeles.

But now fear resided in the corners of my mind, cloaked and whispering. My mind swam with dark, sinister things that accomplished nothing more than the snuffing out of hope.

The dried up rivers where tears had run on my cheeks, cracked and breaking into tributaries, were for what we had said to one another before he left. 

They were preserved in a crust on my flesh, reminders of the fact that perhaps it had not just been a ‘ _goodbye for now_ ’ when he left for his trip.  

They were evidence that perhaps it had been an _actual_ _goodbye_. Full stop on our life together. The end of a love story.

“Mrs. Fraser?” the nurse asked late into the evening. Her palm was warm, foreign, and steady on my forearm. My mind screamed while my lips stayed pursed. _She said it all wrong (it’s **Fraser** , not Frazier, I wanted to explain). _

She said my name at least half a dozen times before she touched me. 

In my mind, I shrank away from her hand. 

In reality, I stayed still and numb, silent under her palm.

My eyes were fixed on the sealed plastic bag in her hands. 

My mouth had fallen mute hours earlier, every bit of medical knowledge and science having drained down my spine and puddled at my feet.  Here, in this place, I was not Dr. Beauchamp-Fraser anymore.  I _could_ _not_ be her. Not at that moment anyway.

“Claire?” John Grey tried, back at my side after finishing a hushed telephone conversation around the corner.  David, no doubt wondering what was happening, had been calling incessantly since we landed here, in this place.   _Wherever that was_.  I had only heard snippets of the conversation – “ _it’s bad_ ,” “ _they will not let us see him again until morning_ ,” and “ _no… I don’t know, love._ ”

 _Love_. Would I ever toss an endearment Jamie’s way again? Would I have the opportunity to find one that stuck? He had ‘ _Sassenach_.’ What did I have to call him for the rest of eternity?

“Are you okay?” the nurse asked again, fingers curling around my forearm.  

‘ _Of-fucking-course-not_ ,’ I wanted to scream from my paralyzed guts, a pitch that would crack my ear drums. But it could not be real, not yet.  I could not even _begin_ to answer her question, so I remained mute.  

“Here,” John had said, giving the nurse a nervous, lopsided smile as he reached for the bag. “Let me take this. _Thank you_.”

Irrationally, I wanted to slap the look of gratitude off of John’s face, to shake him and scream. 

The fact:  _This bag of blood was **not**  a gift_.

What I wanted to say: ‘ _How the fuck can you smile right now?_ ’

But I didn’t. 

I was too thankful that he was there for the mechanics of all of this, to speak when I could not and to guide my empty body and mushy brain from place to place.

Dissociating somehow, I watched John take the bag from the nurse. 

My eyes focused on the contents of it: a life that Jamie always carried with him that had not been stripped, catalogued, and stuffed into a biohazard bag.  But these were no longer just the things Jamie carried with him.  The new, macabre commonality between the items in the bag was that they were marred with blood –– his, on _everything_ , and in varying degrees.

The wallet I purchased him two Christmases earlier ( _JAMMF etched into the caramel leather_. _I knew the contents without seeing them: currency –– pounds and dollars, credit cards, identification_ ). The crease of it was worn with a dark patina from bloody fingers.

Two free-floating photographs ( _a picture of me taken with his phone at an unflattering angle and a picture of us curled together in bed in Spain_ ). Both were curled at the edges and the white backs were smeared with blood and _something_.  I could picture him holding those photographs, studying them, speaking aloud to them.

His iPhone ( _screen cracked, coated with grime, dead_ ). Dried blood filled abstract, striated bursts in the glass where the screen had shattered. 

Clothing that I recognized only on an intellectual level ( _a well-worn Rolling Stones concert T-shirt, his favorite and sent to him by his Da while he was in Afghanistan, gym shorts, trainers and sports socks_ ). The soft fabric, a logo that rested over the center of his chest that I had pressed my face to innumerable times, was marred by a violent array of reds and browns. Earth and blood, dirt and sweat stains, an ode to a struggle.

A water bottle ( _bone dry, uncapped)_. His large, bloody handprint marked the circumference of a broad grip.

A hotel key ( _Marriott logo_ ). A coppery brown thumbprint over the address.

In the elevator on the way out of the hospital, I took the bag from John over his protest.  When he spoke ( _a quiet, bleating “Claire…” that trailed off_ ), I shook my head.  

We walked to the parking garage.  I stood and stared at the car that John and I had rented for a long moment before moving to the passenger side. It was a ridiculous, low-riding, cherry-red two-seater. It had been the only thing available. Drawing the bag closer to my chest, I was stuck on the fact that Jamie would have loved this car.

I sat in silence as John drove, clutching to my chest the bits of Jamie the nurse had handed back to John. Watching desert pass through the passenger window, I was screaming inside and my guts were churning.

When John asked if I wanted something to eat, I managed only a slight “ _no, but we can stop for you_.”  We did stop and he ordered for me despite my continued protest.

When we arrived at the hotel, John accompanied me to Jamie’s room. “You going to be okay in here alone tonight?” he asked, his tone soft. 

He talked to me like I assumed he talked to his daughter.

Two-year-old Celia with the huge eyes and dark lashes, baby soft limbs that had extra creases at the joints, and pouty raspberry-colored lips.

Jamie’s god daughter.

A sick part of me wondered if John and David would find a new godfather for her if Jamie died.

I contradicted the nod I gave him, saying, “No. Not even close.”

 _It was the truth_. I could not muster a falsehood to spare his feelings.

He pressed a greasy bag of food into my hand. “Eat something. Get some sleep.”

“No. Not hungry. Not tired.”

“Just _try_ ,” he implored, eyes warm as he leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. His lips connected with a drum that made no sound.  I was hollow. “You cannot be there for him if you do not take care of yourself. At least take the food so I can tell him I tried when he’s up and about, worried about _you_.”

I could not bring myself to even nod this time. 

 _Be there for him_.

We had seen him for all of five minutes before we were kicked out –– a silent, near-lifeless, swollen, red and purple, sun-chapped _thing_ that was hardly human and decidedly _not_ Jamie. I was not sure there was going to be a _him_  left there by morning.

John caught the door with his hand as I moved to swing it closed. His eyebrows were raised nearly to his hairline. “Do you want some company? Just for a bit?”

Shaking my head, I quietly pushed the door closed to shut myself away with a bland “ _goodnight_.”

Jamie’s hotel room held staggeringly little of Jamie.

 _My husband_.

His suitcase was tucked away in the cabinet.

The bed had been perfectly made by housekeeping staff days earlier.

His toiletries ( _shaving cream, razor, mouthwash, toothpaste, electric toothbrush, moisturizer I made him buy_ ) were lined up on the bathroom counter with a meticulous, Jamie-like precision. 

I opened the jar of moisturizer and sniffed.

_Minimal. Clean_ _._

I dropped the bag of fast food, fries spilling onto the bathroom floor. I stepped over them and into the bedroom. The act was a silent dare shouted into the void of the universe. As though by discarding it to the floor, I was daring Jamie to get better, show up here, and chastise me for it.  To take me against the wall, wrists in his strong hands, and to make a show of how disgusting he found my sloppiness. He would not be angry or even annoyed. It would be a manufactured heat and excuse to be rough that we would luxuriate in for hours.

For some reason that I could not identify, it felt a little voyeuristic when I set about rummaging through his things.  I needed to be close to him in whatever way I could.

I pawed through the dresser, mussing up his perfectly-folded clothing. 

I dug into his suitcase, finding the letter I had slipped him, still unfound and unread.

I sheathed myself in the t-shirt he had had worn when he said goodbye to me the morning he left Edinburgh, the morning I had held back in my goodbye to him.  It had been the shirt that held my glare as he turned and walked out of our bedroom. 

It smelled like him still –– clean, bright pepper and smoky bourbon, cardamom and bergamot. The scent lingered, mingling with the musk of him and tingling in my nose.

I plugged both of our phones in and pulled three tiny bottles of vodka from the mini bar while I waited for his to come to life.  I downed the bottles in rapid succession, dropping the skeletons of my liquid courage into the pile of my clothes I left on the floor.

As the phone lit with the first signs of functionality, I wondered a bit at the sensation that his phone felt like a bit of him. It was _recovered_ ; like his rescue, it was a bit of archaeology. 

Despite the spider web of fragmented glass, the phone still powered on and I was still able to navigate through the screens.With a shaking hand, I began to swipe.

His call list: a series of calls to 911, me, John, the business partner who was traveling with him.  

All had “Call Failed” under the line entries. In the beginning, the timestamps indicated a gut-wrenching franticness.

911 12:10 p.m.

911 12:10 p.m.

911 12:11 p.m.

Claire 12:11 p.m.

Claire 12:11 p.m.

911 12:12 p.m.

Claire 12:12 p.m.

John Grey 12:13 p.m.

Andrew Wilson 12:14 p.m.

911 12:15 p.m.

Claire 12:16 p.m.

Then the calls fell off, becoming less frequent. Perhaps it was a sign that he recognized serial attempts were not going to increase his chances of getting through or that he realized his battery was finite.

Either had surely been a terrifying prospect and to think of him like that….

I could not bring myself to contemplate his desperation, the frantic series of failed attempts to reach out. 

Stomach clenching, vodka threatening to rise back into my mouth, I moved off of the call log and tapped the voice memos icon.  Jamie was constantly leaving snippets for himself –– a reminder for work, grocery lists, ideas that came to him in dreams, silly things he wanted to remember to tell me.

_Maybe, just maybe…_

And there it was, a memo labeled: _“For Claire.”_

With a shaking hand, I tapped the memo. I let my finger hover over the “play” icon for a time before finally pushing down on it.

The tiny logical sliver of my brain that was remaining shut down at the sound of his voice.  

_Claire.  If this is where I die, I need ye to ken a few things. I dinna have time… on this battery and maybe on this earth… to say it all. So I’ll leave ye with no’ what ye deserve, but what I have._

His voice was tired, _so tired_ and only barely above a rasp. His words were filled with the kind of emotion that left no question in me that he _knew_ he was potentially speaking to me for the last time. He was speaking to me in the only way he knew he could. From his tone, it was as if he _knew_ his words would find me somewhere, somehow.

_One, yours is the face I see before I open my eyes as I wake and the one I see when I close my eyes to sleep. I think I have ye memorized, mo nighean donn, and then ye surprise me._

_A sound._

_A quirk of those soft lips._

_A turn of phrase._

_A look when I say something daft._

_A moment after the last when I love ye, when you touch me or move against me that is like a hiccup in the fabric of time._

_A new shade in that glorious head of curls._

_Jesus._

His slurred plea to “Jesus” was about right. 

From the snippets I heard from police and secondhand from hospital nursing staff, I knew only vaguely what had happened to him. But from what little I knew of his condition and where he was found, I could imagine his head lolling forward. I could conceive of the sensation of faintness creeping up the back of his skull as slumber beckoned, his blood pressure falling. 

Drawing my knees to my chest, I let the tears wash over my cheeks and down my neck.  

A suit of molten iron mesh laid over me at his words.

I was hot everywhere.

_What I wouldna do to run my fingers through that hair now –– smell ye sweet under my hands, watch ye turn into my touch.  It’s no’ been but three days, but I feel a need to reacquaint myself with the dark bits of that curly wig. The pieces that are shiny and go chestnut under the sun._

_I’d give my soul to the devil himself to rest my face right in the curve of yer neck and breathe ye in, yer hair on my face, for just one more night._

My teeth gnawed down into my lip. Blood bubbled up through the split in my flesh. It seeped, little by little, into my mouth. It was copper, the flavor of life, on my tongue. But _no_. It was _not_ my blood.  My fingers found the small puncture scar on my arm where Jamie drew my blood just before our wedding. It was _not_ my blood. _Our blood_ ran hot, blistering my veins. ****

_Two, I hope these last words of mine are no’ the last ye hear of me, Sorcha, but I canna bear to leave this world wi’out sayin’ that I didna mean the things I said to ye.  In Edinburgh.  That look in yer eyes.  My God. I could apologize a thousand times, kissing ye with each, and still feel regret over it. When my body meets its end, my soul will surely be called to answer for it when it’s time to account for all my sins._

I whispered ‘ _me too_ ’ into the handset, fingers tightening their grip around it. An overreaction, too much alcohol, too much passion, the threat of time apart. 

Oh God, I had so many secrets things to tell him, so many truths to disclose. 

I wanted to lay at the feet of his doctors and some higher being and beg –– offering everything for him to be okay.

_Three, live for me._

_Live for us._

_Live for the promise we had._

_Bairns._

_Then bein’ Grannie Claire and Grandda Jamie, who are grey and auld, marrit, decrepit. Still horny._

_I ken perfectly well ye’ll never find someone to love ye as I do, but ye can find a great love and make a life… the one we planned._

_I just want ye to be happy and I’ll watch and cherish every moment I can from wherever I end up._

_I promise ye this, Sassenach. Ye’ll be the most wonderful mother._

We had been trying for only a few weeks, any form of contraception and caution had been thrown to the wind.  It had been a gray Tuesday.  As I got ready for another day of work ( _routine surgeries, meetings that should have been emails, a salad bar lunch with Geillis_ ), Jamie’s fingers had caught my wrist. I was reaching for a new blister pack of birth control from the medicine cabinet. The IUD had come out months before when we had a tentative, halting conversation about _maybe, okay, we will try… soon, but not right now_. 

But that misty Tuesday morning he had said, “ _Don’t. I mean, if ye’re ready… **don’t**_.” 

I had dropped the package into the small wastebasket by the sink and held him then as if it would be enough to magically materialize a pregnancy.

Realistically, I had known that it would take some time ( _weeks, maybe months_ ) for my body to adapt back to fertility. But each time we made love there was the question and excitement. _Will this be the time_? 

My purse filled with tampons and the cramping that made me double over the week before meant that we were not there. 

With his phone in my hand and his quiet confessions in my ear, I wondered not _when_ , but **_if_**.

_Four, if I canna see ye again, let this missive forever make clear that when I stand before God, I shall have one thing to say, to weigh against the rest.  Lord, ye gave me a rare woman. And I loved her well._

_If I canna see ye again, ken I’ll love ye from my grave. Christ, I’ve loved ye and love ye still, Claire._

I replayed the message again and again, dissolving into the mattress and aching, crying myself dry.


	3. Part Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How the night before Jamie left for Los Angeles turned south.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so floored by the response to this story. I know it's angsty, but it's the story that's in my head for these two. Sometimes the ones we love the most and best can hurt us the worst. <3 Have faith.

##  **Loss: Act II  
Part Three**

It had been a selfish thought that roused me, panting, after a few fitful hours of sleep in Jamie’s abandoned hotel room.

_Is it harder to be the one who dies or the one who lives?_

On a sheet saturated with sweat, I rested with a clammy hand on my forehead.  I begged my lungs to work normally, as if by nothing more than the force of my will I could catch my breath.

An entire post-apocalyptic wonderland had unfurled in my dreams. The world’s architect was my brain, a traitorous thing aching inside of my skull. The dream had seemed real and familiar, undeniable.

In an imagined alternative universe, Jamie and I had gone home together from the gala and things had been _just fine_.  All of my senses buzzed with the taste, smell, sight, feel, and sound of our newly-imagined last night together.  

I could have sworn to the imprint of Jamie’s mouth on my neck ( _lips dry, tongue flat on my flesh_ ).  

The press of his hands on my hips ( _measuring his own grip from bruises he had put there_ ) was warm and slick on my hips.  

The taste and smell of whisky ( _burnt almond, apricots and smoke_ ) warmed his mouth.

A gasped “ _oh God_ ” from him and an exhalation ( _vowels only_ ) from me marked the moment when we joined together for the second time that evening.

We knew full well our time was up for two weeks and our bodies were making memories, like fingerprints in wet clay that would dry into something to cherish.

My brain was a cruel master, though, not letting the re-imagined reality linger.  

As easily as it had steered me towards a delicious alternative universe and fantasy, my brain woke me as it bent the make-believe creation maliciously.  The second act of my dream focused on Jamie’s eyes –– without lashes and red-rimmed, staring at nothing at all with blue lips –– and my fingers folded, pressing down into his ribs trying to make him _breathe_ air into dead lungs.

In waking, the only remnant of the dream was his name on my lips.

The _first syllable came as a gasping sound_ : “ _Ja–_ ”

_The second syllable followed, well-formed and bookending my emotion_ : “– _mie_.”

Fully awake, I kicked the perspiration-saturated top sheet down to the end of the bed and drew my knees up to my chest.

Grabbing for my phone, I satisfied myself that I did not have any messages.

_No news was good news in the middle of the night_.

I let the time register.

3:12 a.m.

I had been asleep for probably an hour and a half, but it felt like I had woken from a years-long slumber.  

My fingers absently found the diamond pendant at my throat, touching it and rolling it in my fingers like Jamie did when he woke before me. It did not feel the same –– my fingers somehow too gentle and uninterested to replicate faithfully the sensation of his touch.

The words from the night before Jamie left for Los Angeles came to me, each one like a piece of shrapnel in my chest.  

We had failed miserably in fulfilling our promises for a last night.

Early that evening, things had been coated in a fine dusting of nostalgia. I was in a fancy dress and Jamie was in his best kilt. We were lubricated by alcohol and surrounded by doctors and Edinburgh’s upwardly mobile. We were bound to fall headlong into a reminiscence of the first night we had spent together. We had spent that night flirting with our eyes over champagne cocktails and later fumbling in the dark entryway to Jamie’s flat, seeking out one another’s flesh.

We had been riding high on our tryst in my office, letting our mouths and fingers call to mind salacious memories from years earlier. However, that film of nostalgia had been buffed away by Tom Christie, the hospital administrator in charge of my practice area.

All it had taken to wipe the feeling away was Jamie’s reaction to Tom’s overly-effusive greeting and warm hand lingering on the small of my back.

My voice skipped awkwardly as I introduced them. Jamie’s brows furrowed at the sound. In reality, I felt nothing more than a touch of discomfort at the way Tom had touched me in front of my husband, but something ugly was left in the wake of the moment.

“You’re beautiful as always,” Tom had commented, words saturated by alcohol.

This time, Jamie’s eyebrows went almost to his hairline and I felt my cheeks flush.  I was suddenly acutely aware of Tom’s fingers lingering at the small of my back.  I stepped to the side, gluing myself to Jamie’s side as a plea for the moment to end. As I slipped my arm around his waist, I realized that his body was taut, a bowstring ready to release. In Jamie’s case, the release was not of an arrow. It was unadulterated fury, perhaps promising the explosion of Tom’s nose under Jamie’s knuckles.

“Tom, this is my **_husband_** ,” I said by way of introduction.  “James Fraser.”

Jamie’s voice was broad, deeper than usual, when he said, “We’ve met, Claire.”

Tom’s eyes sparkled as he took Jamie’s hand in a too-long and almost-crushing handshake.  “Good to see you, Fraser.”

“Is it?” Jamie asked, face remaining impassive.

After that moment, we never managed to recover the magical rush of the nostalgia, the intimacy, the aching _need_ for one another.  Instead, we had made the wordless decision to leave.

“ _Say something_ ,” I had implored when we got into a car. My voice was quiet.

Jamie’s hand clenched in a fist over his knee when he responded. “I canna say a single thing to ye right now that I willna regret come mornin’, Claire.”

He was in a battle with his temper, something I saw rare enough that it was foreign to me.  Rarer still was his temper being in any way directed towards me.

Our driver’s eyes were fixed on the road in a way that said, ‘ _I can hear everything, but am going to pretend to hear nothing_.’ I was grateful for it.

I attempted to slip closer to Jamie, to whisper the lyrics to the song on the radio into his ear. I tried to unravel his fist and guide it to partake a quiet exploration of the inside of my right thigh. I wanted to guide him back to me, to move on from _whatever had happened_ before things spiraled out of control.

Jamie just pulled away, making a gruff Scottish noise and shaking loose his fist.

“At least say something,” I whispered again. It was a low plea.

He was not facing me, but I saw his reflection flash in the window as we passed under a streetlamp.  

He did say something.  

He said, “ _Stop_.”

We rode in silence.

At home, he poured another drink while I waited for Buffalo Bill at the back door. My back was to him when he _finally_ let loose what had been brewing in him since we left the gala.

“He wants ye and I’m tryin’ to riddle through whether ye want him as well.” He sloshed his drink, waves of the amber liquid crashing against the sides of the lead crystal glass. “Do ye think of _him_ as he thinks of _you_?”

Anger was broiling me from the inside out, blistering the parts of my brain responsible for logic and coherence. Needing a moment to school my facial expression, I squinted across the yard and whistled for the dog, who came happily trotting to the door. His feet were damp and muddy from the evening’s rain.

When I finally turned back to Jamie, kneeling to dry the dog’s feet, he said, “ _Well_? Are ye goin’ to answer me, Claire? Ye’ve been beggin’ me to say somethin’. And now I have.”

“I am.” It was a choked whisper. “What I’m going to say is _fuck you Jamie Fraser_.” My voice rose only on the final two words.

I worked between the dog’s toes like it was the most important task in history. I could not look up at Jamie.

Unfazed, he emptied his glass and forcefully put it onto the counter. From the sound, I wondered for a moment if he cracked either the glass or the counter, maybe both.

“ _Ye’re marrit to **me** , Claire.”_ His voice had been a growl as he shed some of the layers of his gala attire onto the kitchen counter, eyes burning through me. _“_ Ye’re no’ marrit to _Tom. **Fucking**. Christie._ ”

“Yeah,” I responded blandly. “And look how well it’s working right now.”

I regretted my words immediately, but I had committed to a tone.

“You should consider whether you want to sleep in the guest room tonight, Jamie.”

“Aye, ye’re _such_ an adult.”

At that, I turned and stalked down the hall and up the stairs to our bedroom.  

By the time Jamie made it to our room I was twisting, at war with the zip on my dress and damning him for ruining our night over something so meaningless.  I cast a sidelong glance at him, feeling a crick develop in my neck as I managed only a quarter inch victory in the battle to get my dress off.

He had already slipped into a pair of pajama pants and was pulling a t-shirt over his head. It was a clear omen that whatever intimacy between us before his departure was in the past.

Our argument was sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

The distance between us made the very contents of my guts glow amber with a bubbling annoyance at my current state of undress. I cursed the bloody dress, gritting my teeth and willing the zipper to cooperate. I needed to be on even footing with him –– ready for bed or the nuclear explosion as a rare argument devolved into a full-on battle. The last thing I wanted was to be stumbling about our bedroom trying to get naked while he stood stoic, arms crossed over his stupid, perfectly-muscled chest.

When he moved to help with the zipper, I arched away from the reach of his fingers and shot him a look.

“ _Fine_ ,” he muttered, raking a hand through his hair with his jaw set.  “ _Just fucking fine, Claire_.”

The way he said my name, devoid of any love, devoid of passion was foreign to me.  

I let my hands fall from the stubborn zip and shimmied out of the dress from the bottom up.  Jamie gave me a quick, involuntary once over and turned. It was as if either he did not want to see me or he did not feel right looking.

Of all of the ways we were connected, I had never thought that he would shy away from my body. Even when raging at one another, we generally still had _some sort_ of connection. There was no world in which I ever thought that we would be broken enough that we would lose _that_ , the feeling of oneness and closeness running marrow-deep.

Jamie was facing away from me and I fought the urge to walk to him, to turn his face towards me with a finger under his chin.

_“We’re so much better than this,”_ I would whisper to him, brushing my lips along the five o’clock shadow dusting the angled slope of his jaw into his chin.

But, when he turned to me his eyes were flat.

The instinct died as quickly as it had risen.

With a voice as divorced from emotion as I had ever heard it, Jamie said, “Have ye done anything about it then?”

Time and breath stopped, the blood in my veins went viscous and my heart quit pumping. “What does that mean?”

As if his intention had not been crystal clear in its devastating implication, he added, “I mean yer _attraction_ to him? To Tom Christie.”

His questions –– off base and offensive in its assumption –– were the final straw.

“Be specific, Jamie. I want to hear exactly how it is you think I’ve wronged you.”

“Fine.” I had not expected him to oblige my demand. I had expected that he would fold in on his rage, realizing how silly his doubt was. My stomach sank as he instead rose to the request for specificity. “Have ye touched him? Held him? Kissed him? Fucked him?”

Before I realized it, my hand was around the neck of the vase from my nightstand. I had not even consciously decided to throw it when it exploded across the hardwood floor with a sound like a shimmer.

The corpses of the flowers he had brought home for me earlier in the week fell to the floor with hollow _thwaps_. They came to rest in water and thick shards of glass.

We stood for a moment in stunned silence, only the sounds of our heavy breathing remaining.  

Jamie’s demeanor was unchanged –– no surprise at the outburst, no wince at the sound, no indication that he was at all about to come around to see that he was being absolutely ridiculous in his insinuation.

“A bit of an over-the-top reaction for something that’s wholly innocent, don’t ye think?”

He climbed into bed, crossing his legs in front of him and leaning against the headboard.  The dog clambered up onto the bed and settled his long body into the centerline of the mattress.

I stood to full height and looked at him. Measuring my tone, I finally sighed, “I am trying to decide if I want to ignore your question or cut out your heart for asking it.”

“Yer relationship with Christie… it’s too close, Claire. I dinna like the man.”

Rather than cutting his heart out, I elected to answer with such a cool detachment that the words sounded almost encyclopedic in their factualness. “Nothing has happened. _Ever_. The thought has never even crossed my mind. The fact that you would ask makes me fucking ill.”

“Was that so hard?” he asked, taking the book he was reading from the nightstand.  

I saw red, felt it glow behind my eyes.  “I gather that you’re not going to take my suggestion to sleep in the guest room.”

I said it without thinking, without working through that by saying it I was committing us not to spend our last night together in bed.

“Well spotted,” he muttered, running a lazy hand up Buffalo Bill’s furry back and sinking deeper into the nest of blankets and pillows. “I’m waiting for ye to say something. _Anything_ that approaches an apology.”

“An _apology_?” I spat. I felt the real estate between my eyebrows pinch together in incredulity. “He put his hands on _me_. I do not have any control over what that man does. You’re trying to say that’s somehow my fault?”

Part of me wished that I was still wearing my dress. At least then I could turn on my heels and walk out the front door, get a taxi, and find a hotel. As it stood, I was arguing with him at a distinct disadvantage. Clad only in a frothy lace bra and a scrap of underwear that hardly covered anything, I was not exactly in the armor I desired.

“It’s yer fault if he feels bold enough to touch ye that way, in front of yer husband no less. Imagine what kind of laugh he’s havin’ over it. He had his hand on yer back and eyes on yer breasts.”

“Oh Jesus _Christ_.”  I pressed the heels of my hands into my temples.

“I’ve told ye, time and again, that I think ye’ve been spendin’ too much time at work of late… with _him_.” The words rolled out of him. My words were useless. He was emboldened by sheer stubbornness and Fraser willfulness. “Christ I’ve indulged ye some long hours… savin’ lives, makin’ people’s lives better for yer presence in it. But it’s _changed_ , Claire. He’s changed ye.”

I was absolutely incredulous at that point. I started to mutter more to myself than him as I turned to our dresser, carefully stepping over the glittering slash of glass on the floor. “Is this actually happening? Are you _truly_ this dense? I love _you_ , Jamie, even though I _hate_ you right now.”

“If it’s as ye say, that he’s only a colleague, the man’s got the wrong idea about yer relationship. I’d bet m’life on it, Claire. He’s no’ qualms about touchin’ ye, right before my very eyes.”

“You’re a fool, Jamie Fraser. It is _not_ like that. He was _drinking_ , like _you_ , and it was nothing.” The touch had been _something_ , at least on Tom’s part, but for the sake of argument I was committed to this line.  “Sober up and we’ll see if you still want to commit to this radical position you’re taking.”

My comment did nothing to stop the words bleeding from him.  “The only conclusion I can gather is that ye _like_ it, Claire. The attention, his attention.”

My fingers curled over the edge of the dresser, knuckles going white. If he had been standing, I’m sure I would have gone at him then, my small fists useless against his chest and blind with fury.

He concluded with a low growl. “Ye’re _my wife_. And I willna stand by as another man, one who works with ye day in an’ day out, develops feelings for ye. _Particularly_ if ye’re goin’ to no’ do anythin’, but sit by and let it happen.”

I counted to four in my head, trying to steady my breathing. After I was seeing white instead of red, I walked back to the bed and took my pillow.  

If he was not sleeping in the guest room, I would.

In a voice that was quiet, detached, and barely sounded like my own, I muttered, “You fucking bastard.”

When I stood in Jamie’s hotel room bathroom, I stared at myself for a long moment. My eyes were dark and hollow.  My hair was damp with sweat and plastered along my temples, at the back of my neck.

“He loves you,” I said aloud to my reflection, knowing it to be true and needing to banish the recollection of the night before he left.

I took a perfunctory shower, letting tears fall absently and without sound, as I inhaled the scent of Jamie’s body wash and shampoo rising around me.

Stepping out of the shower, I toweled off and finally let my tears run dry again.

It was well before dawn and I was going to sit in that hospital until something, _anything_ happened.


	4. Part Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The goodbye. It would haunt me forever._
> 
> How Jamie and Claire said goodbye before his trip.

##  **Loss: Act II  
Part Four**

_The goodbye_. _It would haunt me forever._

After our argument, and in the dead of night, I had returned to our bedroom. The ache in my lower back from the too-soft guest room mattress had tempered my stubbornness.

Jamie was awake when I came in, on his back with a hand flat against his stomach. When I settled in between the sheets and tugged the duvet, he relinquished his hold on it silently.

Although I longed for the heaviness of his arm over my waist, my pride demanded an apology.  However, it was quickly apparent that no apologies were forthcoming –– from either of us.  

I would come to regret my choice.

Not to give in.

Not to hold him.

Not to be held by him.

Not to let our lips write apologies even when our voices were unable to speak them.

I let the lingering anger win out, resting my head on my arm and not reaching for him. I did not say “goodnight.”  I just fell asleep to the sound of his even breathing.

The next morning, I had watched him get ready for his trip –– his naked silhouette moving carefully around our bedroom.  He was still damp from his shower and was moving quietly, as though not to wake me.

For a moment, my body betrayed the fury still bubbling in my mind and I ached again for his arms. My muscles were convinced that I should reach for him, have him love me one final time before he left. My hands pined to be filled by the swell of his thigh or to lay flat against his belly as I took him in my mouth. My legs begged to fall apart and wind around him, clinging to him as he held himself over me.

Instead of indulging, I let the burn of the night before light anew. It turned to ash all inclinations I had towards a final moment of intimacy before he left on his trip.

The gentle curve of his waist folded as he bent to tie his shoes with his foot balanced on the trunk at the end of our bed. As he finished tying the second shoe, I watched his face shift.  He realized I was awake and watching.

The stony glare he had given me the night before as he rolled onto his side and away from me was gone. In the glare’s place was an expression I had never seen before.

“Are you still seeing red?” I asked tentatively.

He made a Scottish noise, situating his limbs carefully on the edge of the bed. It was as though he did not want to touch me before answering.  Although he was just a small glancing flick on my wrist away, it felt like there was a chasm between us. “I’m somewhere between seeing red and seeing just you again.”

I ached at the truth of his words.

“Are you angry at _me_?” I asked, wanting to reach out and trace with my fingertip the zagging path that a single water droplet had taken over his bare forearm.

“I ken ye’d never step out on our marriage or on me.  But I’m a man. I get jealous. I am still pissed.”

I hummed slightly, not convinced that the anger bubbling out of him the night before was attributable solely to some genetic predisposition to his having a y chromosome.

At one pole, I was disturbed that he could muster this jealousy when he was so plainly _everything_ to me –– _sun, stars, moon_ –– and I wanted to make him see the truth of it.

At the other pole, I wanted to shake him and break vases until he realized how ridiculous he was being.  I wanted him to understand how offensive it was that he would stoop to questioning me over Tom Christie.

“Last night I was furious.  I was drunk, but the alcohol just scratched a scab off of a wound for me. I was angry at _you_ , at _him_ , at that _dress_ ye wore, at his eyes on ye, at yer job for bringing ye two together.”

“Together–” I started, my anger perking from the dormancy wrought by a night’s sleep with a valley of cool bedding between our bodies. I could feel the pink of a furious blush bloom in my cheeks. Something that was at the same time desperate and angry went acidic in my belly. “I told you… Tom’s just an administrator. And I’d never–”

He interrupted me with a click of his tongue and his thumb pressing itself flat on my chin.  

“We need to talk when I’m back, when we’re no’ on a timeline.  I’m no’ three sheets to the wind with whisky, but I’m still no’ fit to be talkin’ wi’ ye about this.”

Jamie withdrew his touch and pulled a t-shirt over his head with a kind of fluid, muscular grace. It made me ache at the thought of two weeks without him.

 _God_ , _how could he do that_?  

He could steep me in such an anger that my vision felt hot at the very sight of him, yet at the same time he could make me need him at a molecular level.

“Great,” I muttered, letting my face drop fully to the pillow.  

Jamie fought passionately; he didn’t always fight fair.  Sometimes that meant that he would get his say and then walk away or shut down.

He turned back to me, eyes narrowed.

“And _you_?” I furrowed my brow and he clarified. “Are yestill cross with me?”

My resolve won out and I did not draw him to me to pour an apology into his mouth ( _with words and lips_ ).  He drew in a breath when I paused before answering.  “I’m suspended somewhere between wanting you to go and begging you to stay.”

An unconvincing smile that did not reach his eyes curled his lips.  “Weel, I’m afraid I’m needin’ to get goin’, and beggin’ willna change matters.  I wish it wasna… _this way_ between us.”

He bent down and kissed me. The kiss was unromantic and utilitarian.  A brushing of lips and closed mouths. No tongue or body.  No fingertips or hands.  

“I’ll call ye.”

“Bye then.” I said, rolling my eyes and nestling back down into the pillows.  As I said it, I questioned my resolve not to draw him down for one final kiss and show him that we would be _just fine_.  That we _were_ just fine.

His “ _bye_ ” hung in the air.

I had not known what was coming.  I could not have known what was coming.

I was not ready to be alone, to be left clinging to the ruin of a life that I did not know.

Almost sixteen hours later, Jamie texted that he had landed, and then again when he arrived at his hotel.  I texted back inquiring about his jet lag, wanting to connect before he fell into a sleep coma.  He did not respond.

The next morning, Sunday, I woke to another text from him: _Beat the jet lag. Eating lots of ramen at the shop around the corner from the hotel. I’ve learned I like runny eggs on everything._ _You would hate it here. Going hiking with some guys from the LA office.  Tell me when it works to call you. I don’t want to wake you._

And then a second, minutes later he had sent: _I am not seeing red anymore.  Just you._

It was _just me_ now, sitting in a taxi at 4 a.m. on my way back to the hospital, alone.

Upon learning that Jamie was hurt, I had gone catatonic –– my limbs and head separated from my body, floating weightless in time and space.

The thought of losing him had a bruising stranglehold on my throat.  

On the ride, I restructured my thinking. There, in the taxi that smelled faintly of cigarettes and heavily of tree-shaped air freshener, I made a conscious decision to compartmentalize the threat of losing Jamie. I could deal with the damage his loss threatened to do to me _if_ it happened. Watching the sleepy landscape of a city in deep slumber pass by, logic became my raison d'être.  

Logic would hold me together, even if it was a substandard balm on the blistering ache of Jamie’s condition.  

Jamie’s recovery was a riddle to be solved.

When John and I left the hospital night before, Jamie was being transferred from a post-op recovery room to the intensive care unit.

From what I had learned and my own brief observation of him just hours earlier, Jamie’s accident had whittled new ridges into his previously war-battered bones and carved new valleys into his already-scarred flesh.

( _A pelvis cracked.  A leg that required stabilization.  A hand that was no longer a hand._ )

His time in the heat without water had left him dehydrated. Suffering from heat stroke, Jamie’s body had begun to fail him.  

( _A heart that had attempted to stop being a heart.  A set of kidneys in acute failure._ )

His doctor ( _young, good hands for surgery, reassuring smile_ ), had said, “ _It’ll take a few hours to get him situated. Six a.m., Claire. You can see him in the morning. Get some sleep._ ”

Unfolding myself from the backseat, I glanced at my watch.

4:22 a.m.

I was one hour and thirty-eight minutes early.

I was not about to wait another ninety-eight minutes to see Jamie, so I endeavored to break into the intensive care unit.  I figured if confronted by some sort of security staff, I could pretend to be _really_ confused and _very_ British.

The receptionist was an easy mark.  A smile, my cranked up accent, a vague explanation (“ _I’m a doctor; just visiting a patient_ ”).  Misleading by implication, flashing a badge (“ _SURGEON_ ” _printed on the bottom_ ). I neglected to raise the fact that that the badge belonged to a hospital was not even on this continent.  I laughed ( _a convincing performance for someone who did not know me_ ), holding up the ID on my lanyard (“ _there we are!_ ” _as I rolled my eyes, feigning exasperation_ ).  She gushed (“ _I just love your accent_ ”) and I smiled, walking past the desk (“ _I’ll just pop in to see him then_ ”).

The intensive care unit was ordinary.  

The walls were a sickly cream color ( _the same color as home; the color that Geillis and I irreverently joked was named “ICU beige”_ ).

The patient rooms did not have doors –– just half-walls of glass and large pale green curtains on metal clips. ( _I attempted not to think about why –– wide entrances to facilitate the nurses’ close monitoring, the movement of patients, the rushing of physicians and nursing staff to resuscitate a coding patient_ ).

The lighting was horrible and stark, fluorescent in a ceiling of polystyrene squares ( _ones that I imagined I would spend a fair bit of time counting, chin tipped back while Jamie slept_ ).

Glancing around as I searched for room 1-1112, I realized it must have been shift change.  Nurses were paired up at stations, staring at computer screens and talking in hushed voices. I pulled my hair up off of my neck and into a bun at the top of my head.

‘ _Look like you belong_ ,’ I thought, squaring my shoulders as I went down the hall. I was just an ordinary visitor who needed to look like she was going anywhere but Room 1-1112.

I was almost to his room when a voice behind me stopped me dead in my tracks.

“Are you Dr. Beauchamp-Fraser?”

I turned, my blood running cold. _Dammit_.

Stepping out of Room 1-1110 and squirting foam hand sanitizer into her palm from the pump on the wall, was a nurse. She was a gangly thing with big, dark-rimmed glasses. Her top knot rivaled my own in terms of sheer curly messiness.  The dark circles under her eyes indicated that it was at the end of her shift.

“Guilty.”

I could have urged her to call me Claire, but that would be one step from logic and the clinical detachment I needed to keep my head on straight.

“I’m Nora. I was your husband’s nurse last night. We’re just changing over, I’m sure you can see.” She smiled just a little, slipping a pen into the breast pocket of her scrubs.  “Dr. Davidson warned me that you’d probably find a way to break in before morning.”

I ignored the comment, needing to know how he was doing. “What was the report you gave to the day-shift nurse?”

“He’s stable, but he has some serious injuries. He sustained a massive amount of trauma, as I know you know.”  She tightened the bun on top of her head, indicating with her head as she started to walk. I followed. “I know you saw him last night and that it was not long at all.”

 _‘Understatement of the fucking century,’_ my mind screamed as it attempted to remember the words I had spoken to him ( _I love you, don’t you dare die, promise me_ ).

“I have to warn you that he doesn’t look great, but he talked to me a bit in the night. Nothing much, just enough to tell me he doesn’t want more painkillers.”

‘ _Stubborn bastard_ ,’ was my only thought about _that_. 

Otherwise my mind was clambering for lab values, urine output, prognoses ( _to the extent they were even ascertainable_ ).

“We’ve been adjusting his IV fluids throughout the night.  When he’s awake, he’s disoriented.  The orthopedic surgeon will be rounding this floor first this morning, so there should be some update on the arm and the leg then.”

Swallowing hard, I nodded. “Kidneys?”

“He’s producing some urine and there’s no blood in the catheter, so time will tell, as you know.  We’ll be running some more blood here just after his next nurse comes on. There is less protein in his urine this morning than there was when he came in. It looks like the suppressed kidney function is the result of dehydration, not trauma or infection. The nephrologist will be by sometime after the orthopedic attending rounds.”

We had stopped outside of Room 1-1112.  

Precisely where I had wanted to be, my feet were leaden and I could feel my commitment to dispassionate medical assessment wavering.

“Before I get on the road, I’m just going to open up his medical record to finish some notes about last night.”  

She typed her password in –– fingers moving in a quick flurry over the keyboard.  

She cranked the screen around and glanced at her watch.  

“Oh, but you know what… I’m going to make a quick run to the restroom first.  I’ll be back to finish those notes.”

The look she gave me was meaningful. I could have kissed her full on the mouth and hugged her to my chest, but I was struck dumb by the gesture.  

Somehow, I managed to nod. ****

Part of me was pulsating at the prospect of seeing Jamie immediately, but I wanted to see the notes first.

I sat down at the computer, knowing my time was limited, and started to read.


	5. Part Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _There had been a moment in which I had appreciated that I was going to fall before it happened._  
>  What happened to Jamie. First person JAMMF POV.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never written from JAMMF's first person point of view, so this is new. Many thanks go out to some of my Tumblr folks for making this happen: @notevenjokingfic, @sassenachwaffles, @kkruml. I'm eternally grateful for their help getting this to where I wanted it. <3
> 
>  
> 
> **TW: This has some description of some pretty awful injuries. If this kind of thing bothers you, it might be best to sit this installment out.**

##  **Loss: Act II  
Part Five – _The Story (Jamie’s Point of View)_**

There had been a moment in which I had appreciated that I was going to fall before it happened.

Even before I took that last bloody step, I had known the ground would give way.

I just _knew_.

Something about the dull, loose grinding of gravel beneath my shoes told me.

I heard my internal Jiminy Cricket say, ‘ _This is not right, Fraser…_ ’

The sensation of emptiness replaced sure-footedness.  

The realization that I was falling, not flying, rose up into my guts and swept the air from my lungs.

It was as if holding the breath would make the fall hurt less or do less damage.

In the moment, I reconciled myself with gravity’s betrayal of my body.  

The air could not hold me even though it felt thick around me, attempting to fight the pull of earth and whipping my clothes tight to my body.

And just like that, it was over –– a few helpless moments that passed like entire centuries and that also like no time at all.

Like a cat, I landed on both feet.

Agility cost me.  Knees buckling, I tumbled forward again. With my body folding over rock, and face down, I was drawn out of my body to look down at the limp mass of my body.

I was watching another being, a broken battered sort of thing that keened on the ground and gasped for breath in suspended animation.  

I sank back into my bones, suddenly feeling every inch of my body as I rolled onto my back. Sun-hot stone vibrated into the seeping, damp warmth of the blood blooming red through my clothes in a slow leak.

My stunned lungs ached as my brain blurred. The wind had been knocked out of me by the fall.

I glanced down to inspect for damage.

Blood was fine.  

Blood I could handle.

I had been bloody before –– fileted by shrapnel in Afghanistan, shredded to bits in a motorcycle accident, cut while felling trees at Lallybroch with a dull axe, going to the ground hard while playing rugby in my teens, nicking the tender skin beneath my chin when shaving with carelessly distracted hands.

I had seen what my flesh looked like opened up, exposed to grit and ground up like raw meat.

But I had never seen my own bone before.

Shards of femur were protruding through my pants.

( _Femur. The name came easily. My already muddled mind clouded further at the memory of our honeymoon.  Claire slurring it –– femur –– as she wove one delicate, drunken pale finger down my thigh._ )

On intellectual level, I understood what I was seeing.  But there in the desert it took me longer ( _minutes, hours, maybe even days or years_ ) to come to terms with the sight of my bones than my blood. 

It made me vomit –– hot and yellow, choking and sputtering, gasping and heaving from an aching chest.

“ _Well fuck_ ,” I muttered, immediately thinking of that awful James Franco survival biopic.  ( _A canyon, desperation giving way to hopelessness, arm sawed off with a pocket knife to escape._ )

It was only when I reached for the leg ( _unable to even conceptualize it as **my** leg_ ), to staunch the pulse of blood through the gash in my flesh, that I realized my hand was completely fucked in its own way.

More bone.

( _The honeymoon inspection.  “Metacarpal”: a term mumbled to me as Claire drew my hand to her mouth and worked it over my palm. She pressed her tongue flat against the new ring on my left ring finger. Before drawing it into her mouth she whispered, “Phalanx. Remember that.” Oh Christ, I remembered._ )

 

I choked on another mouthful of vomit.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I chanted as my stomach revolted. My own sickness plastered my shirt to my chest.  Stink compounded the nausea of seeing my bones protrude through my flesh.

Empty, I cast my eyes around.  

My phone was about twenty meters away.  

It may as well have been on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

( _With her. With Claire. Oh Christ. Claire._ )

It was repetitive, but as the most versatile word remaining in my vocabulary, I could not stop myself from muttering it again: “ _Fuck._ ”

_And again. And again._

My lip split, flooding my mouth with the flavor of copper.  With my right hand, I blindly inspected my face.  A cut through my eyebrow that was already clotting. Some blood of unknown origin, but not an alarming amount.

 _Good_.

I went flat to my back and stared into boundless sky.

In my early adulthood, the military drilled certain survival skills into my head. Despite the years away and hours of therapy aimed at reeducating my thinking, the training would never leave me.

First, responsibility for survival is personal and non-delegable.  ( _I had to rely on myself to get out of this unmitigated disaster.)_

Second, preparation is pivotal.  ( _Water. Shelter.  Distress signals are essential –– reflective, unnaturally vibrant, something that screams SOS.)_

Third, mental preparedness is the most important component.  ( _I can.  I will.  I must._ ) 

 

Panic turns the most analytical minds mad in a survival situation.  Accept the fucked up situation without playing a game of “I could have…” or “I should have…” Hindsight is useless. Assess the situation, take stock of supplies, and consider the options.  Plan and execute.

Acceptance: I had fallen. _Fuck._

Assess the situation: it was hot as hell, even in the dwindling sunlight; my phone was out of reach; my biggest fight for the time being was to fight the desire to sleep.

Inventory ( _from memory_ ): a small, useless kit was buried in my day pack ( _an impulse buy, along with a bladder bag of water and my water bottle_ ).

Plan: none yet.

I arched, attempting to maneuver my arms out from the straps of my backpack.  An acute streak of pain zipped up my right flank and I collapsed back, panting. Maybe just a minute. 

 

Cradling my battered hand on my chest, I stared into the sunset.  The sky was swathed with pink and orange, purple and amber. It was deeper than the sunset I had been going to FaceTime to Claire.  Swallowing my pride, I had decided to apologize, fingers tapping away at my phone as I fell towards nothingness.

 _Apologize for…_.

 _Oh_.  

A set aside recollection: the argument.

“ _You fucking bastard_.”  

The _fire_ in her eyes and her flat affect.

The _hurt_ , courtesy of _yours truly_.

She wasn’t able to face me in our bedroom, where all of my ugly accusations hung, electric in air between us. I had gone to bed fuming, wallowing in my wounded pride, cursing the two of them.

Alone in a bed that smelled like her, I ground my teeth. Stubborn, _needing to be **right**_.

I should have reached for her hand, caught that finely-boned wrist, rubbed a thumb on her pulse, and said something ( _sorry, forgive me_ )then.

 

I should have gone to her when she left our bedroom.  

I should have curled up behind her in the spare bedroom, where the air was neutral and not a well poisoned with jealousy.

I should have whispered “ _it’s not you, it’s me_ ” into her lavender-scented hair.  

I should have pressed my lips to the back of her neck as I said “ _I’m sorry_ ” and “ _I love you_ ” until the words became real to her, until she turned to me and I could see those eyes.

 

I hadn’t done any of those things.

“ _Bye then_ ,” she had said right as I left, intentionally pulling away.  

_Should have._

_Should have._

_Should have._

The next time I wouldn’t just think about it –– I would _go to her_.  If there _was_ a next time.

I cast a downward glance to my left hand and grimaced.

 _Claire_.

I closed my eyes.

Darkness shut out scrub brush and heat, bubbling blood and jagged bone.

She was my last thought.

 _Claire_.

Darkness met eyes when I opened them. The almost orange-black of night had dashed light from the landscape.

She was my first thought when I was again capable of thinking.  

She was the connective tissue in between the first and last _real_ moments of my life.

M _y mind_ had gone soft when I fell.  Slipping into and out of a fog of disjointed memories, I was back _then_. To the first time we met.  

There had been a time when I had not known her name.  

When “Claire” had been just another name and not a single syllable to be protected, said with reverence and care.

 _A meet cute_ : the distillery. She made me feel alive there.  At a time when I felt like I had died, been reborn, and was just learning to live again.

“Beauchamp,” she had corrected me, crossing her arms over her narrow frame smartly.  

The Anglicized pronunciation of her name, the tart rebuke of my question about _why_ she insisted on the pronunciation she did.  I had watched the swell of her indecision take the wheel. Asking me what “Sassenach” meant required her to aside the thunderous pride that I would learn ( _later, not much later, but later_ ) dwelled inside of her. She pretended to know what I meant. I had smirked.

“Beauchamp,” I said into the darkness, startled at the sound of my own voice.  I heard a soft laugh and my eyes moved over the silhouettes of scrub brush and stone.

 _Claire_ –– there but not, a creation of a delirious, painful mind.

“That was good, wasn’t it?” she said, voice warm and accent a thick, muddy echo.  “I was good then. At flirting.”

“Oh. Aye. Ye were.” I attempted a smile. “Still are.”

Claire sat before me there in the twilight, looking at my battered body from some ways away. She was illuminated by that black-orange horizon, hair wild around her narrow shoulders. She was smiling. It was as though she was remembering that first conversation, too.

“God ye were beautiful. Soft lips, monstrously big eyes, riotous hair, and a glass face.”

“Mmmm,” she intoned, resting her elbows on her knees, turning her wedding ring aimlessly.  

“I tried like hell after that tour to catch yer eye.  To muster the courage to ask for yer number, where ye were staying.  Ask ye to maybe, _just maybe_ , have a drink.”

“I _know_ all this,” she said, smiling like she could listen to me tell the story over and over.

_Of course she knew._

That night, I had dreamed of her –– that curly wig, those long legs, that sharp tongue.  

It wasn’t sex that I wanted.

It was something more fundamental and infinitely more complex than just the sweaty tangle of bodies, writhing with mute mouths. I _had_ that, more than I had cared to admit. I pawed for _something, anything_ to feel after Afghanistan.

What I wanted was something both higher and lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs –– to _know_ her.

Married, I knew the things I had longed to know at the start.

But there were still thousands more I needed to know –– things that I had never known that I would care to catalogue about anyone.

I had needed to hear her say my name ( _now she had said it tens of thousands of times –– in happiness, sadness, anger, out of the blue, her body around me and fingers tracing scars bared only to her_ ) _._

I needed to figure out what it was she did at night after work ( _stretchy pants, searing-hot shower, red wine or whisky when adequately cajoled, a turn in her wee garden, harvesting things for me to cook, binge watching episodes of stupid television shows, taking me to bed and curling against me, giving me a look that I knew meant more_ ).  

I had needed to see what kind of books populated her book case and how she organized them. ( _She read non-fiction and classics mostly and had a knack for finding novels we would both enjoy. When we finished Harry Potter, The Hunger Games materialized on my nightstand. Then The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And then… and then… and then.…_ )

I had a need to watch her maneuver through a pub, rosy from a windy walk and snowflakes in her eyelashes. ( _I knew the look of her fresh from a hurried footrace against time when she was running late for a date, a drink, a dinner, a movie. Dodging other patrons’ chairs with bright, damp cheeks and a wide smile framed by chapped lips, she was always saying, “sorry, I’m a little late… work.”)_

I wanted my knowledge of geography to dwindle until it included only the color and pattern of the veins under the delicate skin of her wrists, the arch of delicate bone there. ( _Tissue soft skin, greenish veins, bumping resting pulse that became thunderous with a look, a touch, a word._ )

My mind wanted to collect the sounds that would escape her lips when fingers traced over her elbows and knees. ( _Ticklish behind her knees, she would squirm and let slip the sweetest sounds when I touched her there.  But for a small gasp as her pupils dilated, she was silent when fingers traced the inside of her elbows.)_

I brought a hand to my leg, testing the margins of the wound there.

“I lost ye that day, Claire. When we met at the distillery.  And then… yesterday.”

“You’ve never really lost me,” she said, rising from the rock. She knelt, fingers hovering over the cell phone before she turned. Over her shoulder, she said, “Wrap that leg, soldier. Hand, too.  Then come get this phone.”  

I blinked.  

“Come back to me, Jamie.” It reverberated in my mind.  Soft and English, a bit desperate.  

I blinked again.

She was gone.

I managed to get my backpack off and, from the depths, wrestled free my windbreaker, a spare t-shirt, the survival kit, bladder bag, and my water bottle.

Searing pain tore through my pelvis. I wondered, dully, if I would ever move again without an aching in my bones.  Feeling a touch of panic, I questioned whether I would live long enough for the injury there ( _whatever it was_ ) to heal, to have even the opportunity to develop arthritis.

A scream broke through my pondering –– unfolding, rising and bounding endlessly off rock and tearing across sky.

I thought for a moment of clearing my dry throat, screaming back (“ _help_ ” _–– the word that had not yet brought anyone to my side_ ), but then I stopped, a realization making my blood run cold.

That scream.

It had been produced by **_my_** lungs, my throat. It tore free, a rip in flesh.  Perhaps it was a desperate plea for the angel of death to come, find me, end the pain boiling in my veins like oil.

I drew up the edge of my shirt.  

Purple and black colored my skin, creeping up from beneath my waistband and curving over my hip and up my flank.

“ _Fuck_.”

Years passed in the time it took to wrap my leg. ( _Two plastic lumbar support rods from the daypack on either side, t-shirt over the open wound, windbreaker around the thigh leg, tied off with nylon twine._ )

It felt like an entire millennia passed as I wrapped my hand and screamed into silence. ( _The bill of my baseball cap beneath my fingers. A final look at the wedding ring on my mangled finger before wrapping the cap in a bandana._ )

It was well into the night when I finished and she returned.

Claire.

White dress, bare feet, fresh face, and the white moon casting a halo on loose curls.

There was a time when I had never touched her.

The feel of her skin was unknown but knowable.

The attention of the small hairs on the backs of her hands still a mystery to be discovered.  

After meeting her, I dreamed of touching her for the first time. ( _Not an incidental brush of the hand or a physician’s firm, healing inspection of flesh and bone. A touch with intention, at once innocent and profoundly intimate. Tucking a stray curl away behind her ear, pulling out her hair binder, kissing her cheek just to see if she would blush._ )

Before I had touched her, my fingers ached to learn the feel of her flesh, to see if she was real.

Claire, knees to her chest, looked at me with her head tilted.  She looked otherworldly near the large X I had fashioned from orange nylon tape from the survival kit.

I opened my mouth, closed it, opened it again, let it drift partway closed around “ _Cl––_ ”

She shook her head, kneeling, eyes traveling carefully over me as she tilted her head.  

According to my watch, I had fallen roughly twelve hours earlier.

The coolness of the night was fading into a yellow intensity as the sun rose.

I was sweating.  My head was aching, foggy and heavy.  I could feel my blood pressure falling.

 _Water_.  

I had probably lost at least a few liters of sweat per hour of my three-hour hike. I had significantly less water with me than I should have.

I choked down a few mouthfuls of water –– just enough to wash away the taste or blood and to calm my aching throat.  Although I did not want to be one of those dead, dehydrated people found with a bottle full of water, I did not want to gulp my entire supply away. 

I slept.

When I woke, she was gone and I finally did not feel like I was overheating, even though I could tell the sun was scorching the earth and my flesh.  When I touched it, I felt hot and dry.

 

I sipped some water and endeavored to drag myself to the phone.

I made it a few hours later, limbs cramping and aching. 

 

It proved a useless exercise:  _No signal._

I left Claire a message in my voice memos, convinced that I was at the end and desperate for her to know the contours of my heart.

I slept again.

When I woke sometime later, the sun high in the sky, Claire was there. It was as though my message called her to me through time and space.  I drank, just watching her. 

 

The water was almost gone.

“We were going to make a family,” she whispered.

“I know,” I managed, blinking hard, a picture of the two of us in my hand.

 _She vanished_.  She was never there. And again I slept.

I had been broken by the war. She made me real when she kissed me that first time, the warmth of her lips first on the corner of my mouth.  After making love to her some months later, I asked her what she had been thinking when she kissed me.  Chin resting on my chest, hand tracing the line of hair beneath my navel, she gave me a slight smile. “ _Whether I could, whether I should. How I would live with myself if I didn’t._ ”

She seemed real, here and now –– a beacon framed by imagined white light at the end of the earth.

“Are ye real?” I choked.

She shook her head, fingers reaching but never touching.  “I am real. I am just not _here_.”

My eyes were burning and unable to produce tears, my throat closing.

Exhaustion ( _bone deep_ ).

Pain ( _fading as dizziness set in_ ).

Thirst ( _aching_ ).

Sweat ( _dried_ ).

Vomit ( _pungent, acrid, my body’s early shove towards dehydration_ ).

Blood ( _dry now, dark and flaking on my hands and face, clotted in great smooth rounds beneath my makeshift splints_ ).

Bone ( _unsheathed from skin, fat, and muscle_ ).

Silence ( _infinite_ ).

She was _gone_ and I slept. _And slept._


	6. Part Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe an absolute ton to Kalendraashtar for the help she gave me with this. Any thing that does not make sense is attributable to me, not to her. Also, props to Kkruml for always helping me drive things across the finish line. xx

##  **Loss: Act II  
Part Six**

CPR is nothing like what is shown on television or in films.  

Done properly, the chest recoils under hands and blood rushes into the heart’s chambers.

The shallow, massaging and kneading of most fictional attempts at resuscitation accomplish, quite literally, nothing.

It takes muscle to save a life.

It takes grit to bear down. ( _Five centimeters into a chest again and again –– one hundred to one hundred and twenty times per minute._ )

It is a violent act, digging deep enough to force life back into a body that is failing, willing itself to die and trying to quit forever.  

The echoes under hand of a breastbone cracking or of ribs giving way beneath compressions are wrenching.  But the gut reaction to pull back at the rush of nausea at the sound and feel of it is drowned out by the desire for a patient to  _live_ ,  _live_ ,  _live_.  

Put bluntly, despite the number of bones I had broken in a career of forcing life back into someone’s chest, I had never received complaints afterwards.  

No one ever said to me that life itself  _just wasn’t worth that kind of pain_.

That kind nurse with the messy bun and tired eyes had left me full access to Jamie’s medical records.

There at her computer station, I scanned his chart, looking for the high points and knowing my time was limited.

Paramedics broke two of Jamie’s ribs in an attempt restart his heart and bridge the time from ambulance to medical care in the emergency department.  

Despite the clinical detachment with which the notes were written ( _subjective, objective, assessment, plan_ ),I could envision the gruesome chaos in the back of the ambulance that brought Jamie to this place and back to  _me_. Practicing medicine in Scotland, I had never thought that I would have occasion to see firsthand heat’s effect on a body.

I wished I never had.

Doctor Fraser-Beauchamp blurred with Claire –– seeing the science while feeling every minute detail of his condition stab through me.

His shirt cut down the center, right through the logo.  

Pants flayed open to expose the mangled tissue of his leg and the shard of femur that had met the daylight.  

Nasal cannulas ( _an effort to avoid hypoxia –– tissue death from an inadequate supply of oxygen_ ).

An IV, aggressively pushing fluids into his abused body in an attempt to counteract blood loss and dehydration.

Chest bared, dotted with leads to monitors exhibiting flickers of  _life_  and then  _something else_ ( _death, a permanent goodbye_ )suspended between the  _here_  and  _there_  of his very existence.  

A defibrillator, between sets of compressions, shocking the man I loved in an attempt to stop the ventricles of his heart from quivering uselessly and to make them start  _working_.

Someone screaming at him to “ _just fucking breathe_ ” as they bore down into his chest in an uncinematic, effectual attempt at resuscitation. That chest contained the heart of the man who taught me what it meant to be loved and love in return.

Even with the same features, he would have been no more than an unrecognizable body then.

The same lines and curves of muscle ( _where I ran my hands while he slept or we made love_ ).

The same hollowed out dip at the base of his throat ( _where my lips fit as I drifted off to sleep_ ).

The same broad hands ( _that held my face and neck as he kissed me_ ).

The same scars ( _where he quietly held his stories, close to the vest_ ).

But it would have been a shell of what made that body  _mine_.

Those impressive planes harnessing his power nonreactive to touch.

That throat would have been still beneath my lips, his Adam’s apple never again to bob as he swallowed just before he fell asleep.

Those hands unable to curve into me and make me feel ( _alive with promise, achy with need, safe with shelter, calm with comfort_ ).

The hairs on the backs of my wrists stood at attention as clinically-detached figures clambered their way to the front of my brain, taunting me and sinking needle-like teeth into the tender parts of me.

I was well aware of the grim statistics for patients experiencing an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. ( _Ten percent of patients survive it._ ) Even grimmer, was the rate who survived with neurological function intact. The numbers were throwaway digits that I memorized in medical school, used on some exam, and immediately consigned to a bargain bin of useless knowledge. But  _now_ …

 _A miracle_.

Jamie had the right mix of paramedics who knew what they were doing when  _the absolute worst thing_  happened just as the ambulance rounded the corner to the hospital’s trauma center.  

‘ _He will come back to me as himself. He would never leave you_ ,’ I attempted to reassure myself, running a hand over my arms in an attempt to stop the clatter of my shivering bones.

By the time the ambulance arrived at the Emergency Department, Jamie was breathing again, no longer in ventricular fibrillation, and hot.

 _Really_ hot.

( _The notes said 106°F upon the ambulance’s arrival at the hottest part of the day. Without bothering with the precise conversion, I did a sloppy one in my head –– 41°C. Jesus._ )

The Emergency Department would have been a flurry as all manner of physicians and nursing staff descended upon him, working in tandem.

Treating the suspected cause of his crash as the ambulance rounded into the parking lot ( _hypovolemic shock – excessive blood and fluid loss having thrown him headlong into the worst of the worst medical emergencies_ ).

Attempting to treat his dehydration and drive down his core body temperature –– fluids and more fluids, external cooling with ice packs, mist, fans, cooling blankets, and enemas.  

Identifying broken bones, removing of makeshift splints and tourniquets, assessing injuries and planning.  Disregarding superficial cuts and scrapes, attending to that carved up leg and split open hand. Calling up blood banks, imaging, clearing the board for the operating room.

The confusion, agitation, and slurred speech ( _when conscious_ )noted in the record were unsurprising.  Heat invites neurological and cognitive consequences of varying magnitude. Cognition unraveling, his mental state was profoundly altered.

At twenty-nine breaths per minute, his respiration rate was significantly elevated. I could feel his hot breath, shallow gasps as he attempted to draw air, never getting enough to satisfy his lungs’ insistence for relief. The imagining of it made my chest draw tighter, my stomach stir, and my head go misty.

His heart was pounding was one hundred and thirty-seven beats per minute.  It was in a desperate rhythm as his body struggled to cool itself.  

I recalled a few weeks earlier when we had gone to bed wearing smart watches he had brought home from work.

_“For science,” I had mumbled, checking both of our watches for resting heart rates before going for the tie on his pajama pants. “I’m experimenting on you.”_

_“Are ye kidding?” he had asked._

_Smirking, I had pinned his hands down, instructed him to stay still, and nibbled my way down his chest. Above the swell of his ribcage, I drew his flesh between my teeth and tugged. When he yelped, I looked up innocently, pulling my hair to the side. “Does it hurt?”_

_“A bit,” he confessed, breathy and arching into me._

_“Do you want me to stop?”_

_With a toothy smile and fingers gentle along the curve of my jaw before cupping the back of my neck. “Nah.”_

_The sounds he made, the rise of his hips, the breaths that came from him as gasps, and the choked laugh as he came made me feel unbelievably powerful, sexy, and connected.  Connected to him, the moment, our life together –– something unbreakable and intangible._

_He had uttered something in Gaelic then, and said something I was surprised to remember: “I thought my heart was going to burst.”_

_When I reached for his watch, situating myself carefully over his hips, he grunted with furrowed brows. “Are ye kiddin’?”_

_“For science,” I reminded him, studying the glow of perspiration along the bow of his upper lip. He looked absolutely incredulous as he reached up, taking my chin between his thumb and forefinger._

_At that moment, his pulse had been at one hundred and thirty-nine beats per minute._

He had thought his heart was going to burst in a moment.  Now it had.

Having stomached my fill of the records, I slipped into Jamie’s room, drawing the curtain closed behind me. Breathing purposefully, I fought with myself a little –– the compartmentalization I had worked so hard for wavered to a shimmering pipe dream now that I was able to  _see_ him,  _touch_ him,  _whisper_ into his ear.

Swallowing hard, I turned, eyes pinched shut over an overwhelming swell of tears.

My fingers ached in fists at my side and I shook them loose.

It was a useless reminder, but my mind was only capable of giving me this one thing: ‘ ** _Breathe_**.’

It took me a moment to collect myself to open my eyes and actually turn to him.

**_Breathe._ **

“Hey there,” I whispered, the gentle hum and bump of monitors blurring into the background as I actually  _looked_ at him. Breath catching, I mumbled, “Oh, Jamie.”

The armor of my resolve to stay even  _slightly_ detached turned to dust.

He was swollen and disconcertingly  _pale_  under his sunburn. His right cheekbone had a painful-looking scrape and bruising budded ( _black, blue, yellow_ ) at the margins. His leg and hand were immobilized, thick with dressings and elevated.

Most unsettling, though, was my own the selfish desire for some objective sign of  _pain_.The way his chapped lips rested in a soft expression was positively  _peaceful_. Though I cognitively grasped that he was breathing, that inside of his bruised chest the coiled python of his heart was doing its job, some visible  _pain_  would have confirmed for me there was  _life_ in him.

‘He is just  _sleeping_ ,’ I reminded myself, drying damp palms on my thighs.

With a voice barely above a murmur, I rambled.

“It’s Thursday morning. About a quarter of five. I broke into the ICU. I’m not supposed to be here, but that nurse you hassled let me in. We’re in California.  _Somehow_. You were right. I  _do_  hate it here.”

I hiccupped, realizing that I was crying as I dragged the back of my hand over my cheeks.

“You were hurt, but you’re going to be okay.” I swallowed hard. “You  _have to be okay_.”

His chapped lips twitched just imperceptibly. I dried my nose on the neckline of my t-shirt as I lifted his hand. Just as he had during our wedding, lips met palm.

“I love you.”

**_Breathe._ **

Then I fell silent and just  _thought_ , watching the colors paint the stark hospital bedding with the vivid palette of a desert sunrise. Orange and amber, gold and yellow banishing darkness with fire.

Roughly two hours after I made it to Jamie’s room, I closed my eyes to  _just rest_  with my mouth pressed to the side of his hand and the tubes snaking up his arm carefully situated away from my face.  Time and place, those funny mistresses, lulled me to sleep there in my awkward pose over his bed.

It was a choked sound that broke through the rhythmic clicking and beeping that had lulled me to sleep. “ _Claire_.”

My eyes felt gummy as they fought to open.  When they did, I couldn’t help but to stare at him for a moment before I unfolded my legs from under my body and drew myself up from the belly of the chair.  

“Jamie?” 

_Was my name, spoken from his lips, a dream?_

I was trying to sound  _with it_  and  _firm_ , but my voice tentative and hopeful. I saw his hand twitch, a fluttering, little movement, that brought me onto to my feet.

“Don’t. I’m going to hit the call button.”  

“Are ye––”

“ _Hang on_ ,” I implored him, crying again as I punched the call button.

“––real?”

His eyes were half-hooded and dull, looking right through me. “Am I real?” I choked.

He nodded. It was the slightest nod, but it was a nod.

Curving my hand around his cheek, brushing my lips over his, I whispered into his mouth: “Yes. Yes. I’m real, and so are you.”


	7. Part Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quiet reconnection.

##  **Loss: Act II  
****Part Seven**

I was a moth, intoxicated by his light.

“ _Claire_.”

Jamie’s voice was broken.

“ _You’re okay_ ,” I croaked over a throat full of tears, unsure of what to say or how to say it. So I repeated it again and again, letting it become a chant as I allowed myself to be drawn closer to him.  “ _You’re okay. You’re okay_.”

“Ye’re…”

He started to raise his uninjured hand.  It hitched on some invisible barrier before he returned it to his side, his lips tightening into a line and fingers trembling a bit as they curled into the sheet beneath him.  He stilled completely.

His abbreviated response ( _“ye’re…”_ ) was a heavy and low-hanging fruit, waiting for me to pluck it. The syllable stayed there in the stillness between us. It begged for me to complete the thought with ‘ _here_.’ However, instead of filling in the blank he left for me, I touched my lips to his forehead. His intake of his breath felt like a puncture of a needle. ( _Sharp but with a dull exhale._ )

After a beat ( _breaths, blinking, a twitch of his thumb_ ) and with eyes closed,Jamie finished on his own, “… _here_.”

“Yes, Jamie. I am here.”

His mouth was warm, dry lips turning just enough to find my cheek.  

I felt the slight, seemingly unintentional brush of his uninjured hand over my breast as he sought out some touch, a connection. I looked down and took his fingers in mine.

“I saw ye so many times. Ye came to me. When I dreamed… sometimes…” He swallowed, voice fading away.

I drew his hand closer to me, holding it over my heart. His fingers opened, his palm resting on the fabric of my shirt.

“Yer heart… it’s beating… and ye’re  _sae warm_.”

“Yes,” I choked, my hand squeezing over his.  “Heart beating, warm, here…”

I could feel the tempest of a breakdown brewing in me, churning slowly in my belly and threatening to erode the makeshift barrier I had constructed inside of me.  The way he was looking at me hit at the wall, dissolving it to nothing more than sand to be pulled out to sea.

I swallowed hard, like dry-swallowing a pill, before finishing the thought: “ _I’m real_.”

He inhaled, a small drowsy sound I had never heard him make rising from his throat. I suddenly realized that that noise from his throat was the exact sound that my glass heart made as it broke into a finely-milled dust.

“Feel this?” Careful not to jostle him needlessly, I moved his hand to rest over his chest. “So are  _you_.”

He was  _crying_ , fat tears slipping over the well of his eyelids, darting down the twin ridges of his cheekbones, and collecting in the dirty-auburn stubble ghosting the top of his lip. “Ye came, but ye never touched me, Sassenach.”

Tears glistened in the rasp of beard along his jawline and on the prickly rise of his Adam’s apple. Leaving his hand over his heart, I smoothed back his hair and trailed my fingers over his cheeks and throat, collecting tears with the back of my hand.

“I thought I’d no’ live to see ye again, Claire. To say ‘sorry.’ To touch ye.”

His words were the Grim Reaper’s scythe and they hollowed out my chest with a single, swooping scrape. ( _That voice memo he left me, his words. They were the product of desperation and threatened mortality’s ability to expose nerves. I had known he thought he was going to die, that he agonized over our parting in the process, but hearing him confirm it was like taking a bullet to the chest._ )My mind felt like it had tilted on its axis, disrupting my equilibrium, and I lowered my body until, as cautiously as possible, I could rest some of my weight on the edge of his bed.

Fogged by painkillers and a sheen of tears, Jamie cast his gaze downward as I raised his hand to kiss the palm.

“I can touch you now.”

I leaned forward, bringing my lips over his in as delicate of a kiss as I could manage, fighting back the urge to claim his mouth with a vengeance that would leave us both breathless. I wanted to mark him, make his lips swell between my own. That living, breathing mouth still had years upon years of stories to tell, kisses to receive and to give, skin to explore, and breaths to draw. That mouth was a gateway to our future and I whispered into it, speaking without any conscious decision as to what I would say. “Don’t be afraid.   _It’s the two of us now_. And you’re going to be  _fine_.”

His breath hitched, wispy and heavy in his throat, as he nodded, almost imperceptibly, his eyes closing as he exhaled a rattling breath.

“Better than fine,” I added, more for my benefit than his.

I was careful as I drew myself closer, knowing I was risking putting a painful pressure on his battered body.  My fingers, damp with his tears, threaded into his mess of sticky, unwashed curls.  

“I love you, James Fraser.”

“Ye’re only saying that ‘cause it’s the right thing to say to a verra poor excuse of a man.”

The barrier against the storm was gone and I started to cry, hiccupping and shaking a little. “Poor excuse of a man? You bloody idiot–– you’d joke on your deathbed.”

The reality was that he  _would_  joke on his deathbed struck me, sending jolts of electric current down my spine. Sniffling, I shook my head.

“But you’re  _not_  dying you bloody Scot.”

“I ken I’m no’ dying Sassenach.”

“And why is that?”

“‘Cause the worst thing ye could call me is a ‘bloody Scot.’”

Though I gave him a pity laugh, I was stricken by the urge to inspect his body personally, to catalogue every contusion, abrasion, and laceration.  His ribs had a gravitational pull to them, urging me to feel, to play them like a piano so I could learn where he hurt.  

I wanted to palpate his sun-abused flesh and find the achy soft bits of him, just to make sure his injuries had been properly identified and a clinically-appropriate care plan put in place.  

Instead, I asked, “How is your pain?”

When he opened one eye, I could tell that the pain was layered over him as though he were buried a mile underground.

“Isna bad.”

 _Liar_. I  _knew_  that he was lying.  His pulse was hammering, blood pressure spiking, sweat blooming along his hairline, pupils growing to saucers from a surge of adrenaline, limbs shifting uselessly in search of unattainable positional relief.

Pain made his words come out slowly –– drawled, clipped at the ends, and masked by an accent that was nearly indecipherable to all but my trained ears. Pain made him stoic in a way I had never seen him before –– jaw set, the lines of his neck pronounced, words even.  Pain made his stubbornness swell to a level I had never before seen, despite having been witness to many manifestations of the trait.

“You’re a  _liar_ ,” I said a little blandly, eyes leveling him in the best way I knew how.  In response, he snorted a little, face contorting into a grimace as he shifted. I raised my eyebrows, pursing my lips, as if to say ‘ _see?_ ’ I tried to keep my voice even. “There are things that they can do to help…”

“Ye canna make me take anythin’ more.  This is enough.”

I studied him for a long series of moments before sighing, “ _Why_? I don’t understand  _wanting_  to be in pain. Not to mention inadequate pain control is going to mess with you –– your blood pressure, your heart rhythm, pulmonary function. It’s not just a machismo thing. It’s your  _body_ , and… I’m sorry… but it’s broken right now.”

He swallowed, the long line of his throat pulsing with the effort. “Because I… I laid in that sand, dyin’, Claire. The entire time, wishin’ to God that I’d see ye again, touch ye.”

I stared blankly, uncomprehending.

“I dinna want my brain foggy, to cloud ye, now that ye’re here, now that ye’re real. I’ve  _been_ foggy. After Afghanistan, layin’ in that military hospital. I didna have something to keep me goin’, to see then. I  _do_ this time.”

My tears were falling faster now  “You once told me that you could bear pain, but you couldn’t bear mine. That it would take more strength than you have.” I kept my eyes locked on his, hoping that comprehension would dawn, that he would see where I was going.  His lips parted slightly, but he stayed silent.  “You think it’s any different for me?”

“Maybe…. I…. I… ye ken what happened. I deserve it, for how I acted towards ye.”

“Bloody man.” It came out as a grumble and at this, one corner of his mouth turned up into a smile before falling back into place. “If that kind of… disagreement… means that you deserve to  _suffer_ ….”

His hand seemed like a safe place for me to touch, so I did, holding it up gently as I kissed the radial loop of his fingerprints, the dry skin of his knuckles, the soft depression between his thumb and pointer finger. Our eyes did not part.

I whispered, “You would never watch me refuse pain medication. I need you to feel…  _comfortable_. I can see it in your face that you’re not. I can’t see you like this.”

And, thankfully, he nodded.

I pressed the call button to summon the nurse.

After a brief discussion about some changes to his pain control, he was drifting.  The rush a fast-acting

The narcotics his medical team had pumped into him to alleviate that pain ( _over his remaining weedy protest about not feeling foggy that was ended by a look from me_ ) drew his pupils to mere pinpoints and made his body melt into the mattress like a pearl in vinegar.

Under the spell of morphine, each blink battled the sticky-slow seduction of another opiate-induced slumber. I leaned forward from the chair where I was sitting, dipping my finger into a pot of petroleum jelly to smooth over his lips. Eyes never focusing as they searched for me, he mumbled, “Dinna hover.”

Despite the request, he turned his uninjured hand over with no lack of great effort. It was an invitation. I readily accepted. As his eyes drifted closed, I sighed, “I’ll hover if I want to hover, James Fraser.”


	8. Part Eight

##  **Loss: Act II  
** **Part Eight**

_Sea salt-slicked cheeks. Making love under a red and white umbrella on the beach. Uttered assurances that no one would see us moving together.  Sun-ripened noses glossy with ocean and sweat. We were warm with sunshine and the fact of our marriage just days earlier._

_Jamie had an infatuation with inspecting our ring fingers every night for tan lines._

_“What do you want most in the world?” I had asked, lying on my side on a striped towel with my fingers tracing the curved bump of each of his ribs one by one._

_“I want to love ye forever, take care of ye forever. To be strength for ye always.”  Humming a little, I placed my mouth on the swell of his bicep and breathed in the scent of him. “Christ you are beautiful.”_

_“If you say so,” I mumbled into his arm, grunting a little when he resisted my efforts to wrap my legs around him._

_“Do ye not believe me? Have I ever lied to ye?”_

_“That’s not what I mean.” I sighed a little, attempting to blow a curl out of my eyes. He relented, guiding my thigh up over his stomach as he took care of moving the curl for me. “If you say it, then it’s true. You make it true.”_

_“Oh, aye? Beauty and the Beast, then.”_

_“Hardly a beast.  You’re beautiful to me, Jamie.” My voice was soft as I took his hand, looking at the bronzed perimeter of a suntan on his ring finger before guiding it to my hip._

_Those hands, his arms, were my home._

_The breadth of his fingers splayed over me, drawing me closer and playing my body until my voice became an orchestra of tones just for him._

_“So beautiful that you break my heart.”_

_There, those hands cupping me, I melted with him_

Jamie had fallen headlong into a morphine-black slumber roughly an hour before John showed up at the hospital.  After I stepped into the hallway, he listened to the abridged version of what I knew. My fingertips worried my lower lip and he pulled me to his chest, smoothing down my hair.  

His grip on me was a bruising vice as he said everything was going to be okay.

“Will it?” I asked quietly, my words coming out in a jumble against his chest.

“Can it be any other way?” he responded, wiping at my cheeks with his hand. I had not realized I was crying and I shook my head. My mouth had gone dumb and my lips were too heavy, incapable of speech.  The only truthful answer was “ _yes_.” And I could not lie simply to broker a mutually comfortable Neverland of best case scenarios.

We situated ourselves on either side of Jamie’s hospital bed as twin bastions to keep watch over our charge.

When Jamie spoke sometime later, time had devolved into a construct that had no meaning. He used only drowsy vowels, the gummy weight of his tongue valiantly fighting his efforts to string letters together to make words.

Eventually he managed.

“Ye did this… to… to me.”  He seemed lucid, but when his eyes caught mine they looked like they were bearing the weight of the world. Nonetheless, a drowsy cloud of fog had descended over them. “I didna want to feel… drugged.”

“You agreed that this is what’s good for you right now,” I mumbled, brushing a weighty, greasy curl off of his forehead. I carefully situated my limbs as I leaned close to him, attempting not to jostle his battered body. His eyelids drooped as he smacked his lips and made an accusatory sound that originated somewhere in his chest. “Do you trust me to make these decisions?”

“Ye ken that I…” His voice trailed, eyes closing at the effort of swallowing. His throat bobbed beneath the labor of it.

I ran my fingers over his jaw and pressed my lips carefully to his stubble-dotted cheek. I had to look away, concentrating my attention on the nearly translucent sun-bleached hairs on the back of his wrist.

“Ye ken I trust ye wi’ my _life_ , Claire.”

 _His life._ He turned to me, warm lips brushing against mine.

The afternoon came and went.

Checks of his vitals ( _blood pressure approaching his slightly low baseline_ ).

A mid-day soap opera muted on the television ( _lots of gesticulating and designer clothing_ ).

A wilting vending machine sandwich and sludgy coffee ( _with dead taste buds, all I could sense was stomach-churning texture_ ).

A careful inspection of Jamie’s catheter ( _not enough urine to satisfy me, kidney function still suppressed; his feet and ankles were beginning to swell_ ) and the grenade-shaped bulb into which fluid was draining from the wound on his leg ( _serosanguinous fluid not yet fading to the pink color I hoped for_ ).

It was early evening when the nurse who brazenly ( _empathetically_ ) left his file open on her workstation showed back up for her shift.  

“Nora,” she reminded me.

“I remember.” ( _And I always would_.)

“We’re going to change the dressing on that hand.” Nodding, I tucked my legs up under my body to give her space without having to leave the room.

Jamie awoke in a blinking sort of re-acclimation to his surroundings when she touched his shoulder. “Mr. Fraser, I was just telling your wife that we are going to change the dressings on your hand.”

Her touch was careful as she snipped tape with a pair of scissors and unwound layers of gauze. But then she paused, hands hovering over Jamie’s hand.

“I’m going to go put a call in to the intensivist.”  I attempted to swallow, to nod, to say “okay” or _anything at all_ , but I was caught in my brain’s quicksand.  The first thing that struck me was the smell –– sweet, nutty. I sat up a little further, heart hammering relentlessly. Nora gave me a look over her shoulder.  It was _one I had seen many times before –– the look of ‘this is not quite right_.’ I did not need her soft sigh or that look to know.

An unnamable feeling swelled under my ribs, shifting bones and stretching the cartilage that connected them to my sternum. Anchored in the center of me, it ached. I could hear the blood slamming shut the valves of my heart, my heart rate becoming a violent protest against the catastrophizing of my mind.  

The swelling feeling’s twin, an insidious monster, settled low and tight in my belly. I wondered how many times the universe would force us underwater. If all of this was fate’s sick test to see if we would drown.

_Infection._

After Nora draped a clean bit of gauze back over his Jamie’s hand and excused herself to the corridor.

“Sassenach?” I could see the struggle in him as he attempted to sit up, wincing. “What is it?”

I rose from my chair, stumbling a bit to his bed side.  “Don’t worry,” I said, attempting a smirk as the lie poured from my mouth. “It’s just another bump in the road.”

“I dinna believe ye wi’ that glass face of yers. I’ve never heard ye use the phrase _‘bump in the road_ ’ in my life.”

He wasn’t wrong and I looked away, as if my facial expression had not already betrayed my real assessment. I took his chin between my fingers and murmured quiet distractions to redirect his attention. He was just drowsy enough that it worked, eyes settling on my mouth.

“I may be high, _mo nighean donn_ , but ye still canna lie to me.”

From the way it looked ( _inflamed, weeping, dark at the edges, startlingly viscous drainage_ ) and the smelled ( _thick in the nose, sweet and nutty_ ), I knew it was bad. I just shook my head; the last thing he needed was to see his hand. “ _Trust me_.”

It didn’t take long for the intensivist to arrive, take one look at the wound, and call the on-call surgeon. ‘ _Someone else’s problem_ ,’ had been a phrase I had used before and it was the best descriptor for the look on the intensivist’s face.

And roughly seventy-five minutes later, Jamie’s surgeon calmly announced his recommendation that he go back in and debride the wound a second time. The first surgery made significant headway in getting the wound clean; however, the sand and grit of Jamie’s ordeal in the desert had been deeply embedded. Despite his body being flooded with antibiotics, Jamie’s immune system wasn’t keeping up.

I ran the most likely scenarios in my head.

Best case scenario, Jamie would have at least two more surgeries.  One to clean the wound on his hand.  Another surgery to remove the external fixation that was keeping his femur held together until his medical condition otherwise stabilized and replace it with a more permanent solution. Worst case scenario, I could not bring myself to fathom. Somewhere in the middle was some number of surgeries between two and god knew how many.

A second surgery to clean the wound was not a surprising development, but it was a gutting one.

“We caught the infection early,” the surgeon explained. I looked to Jamie. He was tracking everything, eyes unglazed for the first time since I had arrived that morning and the line of his mouth thin.  “We need to give the remaining, healthy tissue a chance.”

I focused my attention on monitors connected to my husband. Various leads and tubes measured his response to the news. Pulse. Blood pressure.

“Will I lose the hand?” Jamie asked, his eyes somehow even flatter than his voice.

Catching my breath, I started before the surgeon with an imploring “Jamie––”

But he cut me off with a simple directive: “Claire, _stop_.”

With a single glance, my mouth snapped shut and my tongue turned into a sour, useless appendage.

He turned back to the doctor, repeating, “Will I lose the hand?”

Jamie’s pulse was picking up speed, his blood pressure rising. His hand twitched away from mine, finger curling down into the thin, hospital-issue sheet.

The surgeon touched Jamie’s shoulder, shaking his head. “We aren’t there yet.”

It was a realist’s answer.

An answer to set expectations.

A good answer for a surgeon and the worst one for the two of us all at the same time.  

When we were alone again, John bowed his head, muttering “ _sorry mate_ ,” and concentrated on removing a black scuff from the tile floor with the tip of his tennis shoe.

“They… we… the doctor said… they caught it early,” I croaked in a voice entirely unlike my own, tripping over words. Pausing, I switched tone, a momentary compartmentalization that I was somehow able to accomplish. The façade of steely Dr. Beauchamp-Fraser erected itself in a protective barrier over _Claire_ , Jamie’s rapidly-deteriorating Sassenach. “Open femur fractures can be tricky. It’s a good––”

“Can ye leave?”  Jamie gritted his teeth, the cords in his neck bulging.  I looked from his face of steel to John’s, which was looking up at his friend expectantly, rapidly melting.

“Jamie, I…” I was crumbling, my mouth sweating. The softer bits of me had already washed away in the rocking ebb and flow of the riotous ocean in my stomach. The harder bits ( _the very structure of me_ ) were giving way to erosion. I was breathy. “ _Jamie_. I can’t… I… you… is it, I don’t know, did I say something?”

He turned slightly, that preternaturally beautiful face stock still, save the muscle along his temple working ( _slow, graceful, thoughtful_ ). “Claire, please. It’s no’ anythin’ ye said or did. Just… for a few minutes. I need to talk to John.”

My throat was rapidly closing as I reached for the handbag at my feet.

‘ _Do not cry. Do not cry_ ,’ my mind instructed me on repeat as my eyes started to burn and my vision began to blur. My mind’s plea was relentless in its attempts to school my reaction to Jamie’s request, chanting a secondary track: ‘ _Do not vomit. Do not vomit._ ’

I managed to mumble a blurred response, rising from my seat. “Fine.”

I barely made out the words as Jamie said, “ _Ye must take care of her, John_.”

And the cry that escaped my husband then, just as I rounded the corner out of the room, took my knees and my breath. On the floor, I released my own gasping, drooling, tearful sob.


	9. Part Nine

##  **Loss: Act II  
** **Part Nine**

Waiting room time is different than real time.

Seconds become minutes.  Minutes become hours.  Hours become an eternity.

Waiting room is limitless in its power to manipulate the mind into considering all manner of dark eventualities.

That power became more than a mere unwelcome abstraction to me. It was no longer a concept that I appreciated solely through the eyes of a patient’s family or from a chapter in a textbook about bedside manner.  

The moments before he went into surgery replayed again and again in my head.

_“I want to kiss ye…” His voice had trailed off in a way that left no question about what he had intended to say._

_(“One last time” remained unspoken.)_

_His tongue was almost shy as it darted out to wet his lips and I leaned closer, pressing my mouth to his. For a moment we were still, like the dumbstruck first kiss of two teenagers playing spin the bottle. But then a pale noise, unlike any sound I had heard before, came from between us.  A dry, deflating thing that sucked all of the air from my lungs. Jamie pulled back just a little, his breath still warm and uneven on my parted lips._

_“Claire…”_

_That was when I realized the noise had come from me. For a moment, my mind rocked back and forth –– recalling his words to John, his quiet plea that his best friend take care of me. “I need you, okay?”_

_“If I die––” The drugs made him maudlin –– slushy around the edges and significantly more talkative about fear than I had ever seen him before.  He was a natural planner and had drafted the blueprints for his own worst case scenario._

_“You are **not**  going to die,” I ground out, kissing his forehead and wrenching my eyes shut to keep out the daylight. “This is nowhere near bad enough that you’re going to…”_

_I swallowed as my brain shorted out, unable to even let the three letters move past my teeth._

_“You’re stuck with me, Jamie.”_

_I could not look at him. I could not bear the sight of his face (an unspoken agony dwelling there in lines between his brows and a downturned mouth) or that hand (swollen and draining, prepped for surgery). I pulled myself up as straight as possible, trying to discard the phantom pain of a loss I had not experienced._

_“Besides. That kiss was **horrible**. You’re going to live to do it properly.”_

_“Claire.” His good hand took my wrist, his thumb and forefinger making a complete loop around it. “Ye canna let them take the hand.”_

_Amputation._

_“I’d rather die.”_

_I knew what amputation felt like deep in my bones –– holding that saw and breeching the surface of bone.  In an attempt to dull the muscle memory of the act, I twined my fingers further into the soft waves at the back of his head._

_“Claire.”  His uninjured hand took my wrist, thumb and forefinger making a complete circle around it. “If I die, you must promise–”_

_“No,” I repeated, shaking my head and pulling out of his grasp, unable to promise anything if the assumption was of his death. “I’m not going to let you finish that sentence because it isn’t going to happen.”_

_Even if a promise would give him peace, I couldn’t do it._

_In the hallway, Jamie’s surgeon had earlier broached the subject of salvage versus amputation. With a sharp finger in his chest, I had demanded that he “fucking figure it out” and snapped that I would be able to figure it out. I had returned to Jamie’s room, my stomach in a never-ending freefall._

_“Sassenach… just listen.”_

_Selfishly, I mumbled, “I can’t.”_

_“Ye **can**.”_

_I finally allowed myself to meet his eyes.  They were tearless and clear, dull. “No, Jamie. I can’t. You’re it for me.”_

_“John will––”_

_“Fuck John,” I snapped, tears flowing freely. Losing him, even the abstract possibility, was the one thing that could reduce all of my internal structure to rubble. He had razed the last fortress I had built to withstand this storm. “I cannot live in a world without you. So **stop**.”_

_His mouth moved just a little to meet my chin in a dry scrape of stubble and chapped lips.  “I’ll find ye in the next world and the next, mo nighean donn.  On a loop. Over. Over. Over again. Even if it takes me two hundred years.”_

_I found his mouth carefully, kissing him properly. He tasted of blood and heat, dry skin and breath that had ceased to taste like anything. I issued a statement wholly inadequate to express how I felt about him (“I love you”) and a single commandment (“live through this”)._

_And he was wheeled away._

My understanding of what it meant to wait, to have one’s mind spin and spin, evolved rapidly.  

I was on the other side of the world and could only think of time and home.

 _Our time.  Our home_.

The home that held our bed and the framed photographs from our wedding.

Where there was an embarrassing amount of dog fur and said dog himself. ( _Ruddy and senseless with comically large paws, Buffalo Bill loved me. But he made no bones about being a daddy’s boy through and through_.)

Where a never-opened drawer in our bathroom was filled with pregnancy tests in unopened boxes. ( _Jamie had come home from work with an overflowing paper bag of them after we decided okay –– let’s try this crazy thing. Let’s raise a tiny person. Together_.)

Where a woven basket next to the fireplace held the blankets we curled up under on chilly autumn evenings. ( _To become cover for our hands that sometimes had minds of their own. Or for watching movies and falling asleep against one another on the sofa before the credits rolled. Blankets that lived in knit puddles on the floor when we woke well into the night only to amble towards our bedroom._ )

The home where the very grain of its wood was stained with stories.

The corner of the front room where Jamie put up our first “married folk” Christmas tree while I was at work. ( _Dotted with decorations he had stolen from Lallybroch, an ugly hand-painted ornament with our names and wedding date on it, a bedraggled angel in a golden dress at the top, multi-colored old-fashioned bulbs that sizzled to life on a timer._ )

The water ring where I had left a sweating glass lemonade on the hardwood floor. ( _A blemish that caught Jamie’s eye, but he never mentioned._ )  

The windowsill where our bodies had joined when he had an abysmal day at the office. ( _The curtain lifting over the bench that we broke in together, overwhelmed by a seemingly insatiable curiosity to see if our limbs worked the same way in our home as they had in our rented flat._ )

Where the same two coffee mugs sat rinsed and ready next to the coffee maker. ( _It produced good coffee, but only in response to Jamie’s ministrations._ )

Waiting room time has a way to make the mundane details of a life take on a new significance.  

I worked through contingency plans for the worst-case scenario.

If he  _died_ , I would never( _could never_ ) _,_  return to Scotland.

I would never drink coffee again.

Unable to figure out what to do with all of those  _memories_ , those pregnancy tests and blankets, the coffee mugs, those bloody Christmas decorations, I would abandon our house full of memories and become an expat ( _again_ ).

I had seen death.  My parents had been taken from me.  The first patient who did not make it ( _Marianne_ ). And then another and another still. I had faced death, dealt with it, and made it through. I had never been afraid of it –– the body’s systems ceasing to work in tandem was a fact of life.  But with Jamie, the mere thought of death brought on an entirely new set of emotions that was tangled and impossible for me to face.

And when the mind ceased with that thought, it started to wander to darker territory.

Halfway across the globe, I became one of the castaway waiting room travelers.

At work, hospital administration had replaced the waiting room carpet one quiet Sunday.  The battered beige floor covering ( _freckled by all manner of vending machine coffee and embedded with snack foods crushed under the feet of families quick to rise at a doctor’s appearance_ ) was ripped out.  They replaced it with tile and a rug.  

By Thursday, the rug was almost threadbare in a single path in front of the chairs. Waiting and walking, wearing a path.

By Monday, the rug was gone and only tile remained.

In this anonymous American hospital waiting room, my feet carried me back and forth along the same fifteen-foot strip of carpeting.  

Sitting in waiting room chairs is not unlike time travel.  Mind hurdling backwards and forwards, alight with activity and unable to focus.  My time vortex meant that while pacing, I never strayed from its limited universe of topics: Jamie, our lives,  _our life_.

Consciousness catalogues every missed moment and opportunity.

Every seemingly insignificant moment instantly writes itself on veins and takes on a profundity with the benefit of hindsight.

Our entire history played out in the theatre of my head.

A conversation on a street corner where it was  _really_   _clear_  that I loved him, but could not say it. His confession to me that night when he thought I was sleeping –– that he loved me.

When he was leaving for this trip, a long look before his goodbye, lingering and memorizing. It was almost like he had some sort of premonition that the goodbye may be the last. My eyes rolling, I had still been annoyed over our tiff the night before. I had called him a  _‘fucking bastard._ ’ And all I could muster when he left was  _“bye then.”_   

 _Bye then._ It was not the kind of thing anyone with even half of a soul says to the person who has promised to love them unconditionally and forever.

In waiting room time, every purposeful slight to make a meaningless point takes on new meaning and becomes a regret.

Before Jamie left for his business trip, I had decided to run the clock with my silence –– just to make sure that he felt my annoyance. A few hours later when he kissed me goodbye, my lips only  _just_  moved under his.

_Bye then._

After a while my mind started to play tricks on me.

I wondered about the people who had sat in those uncomfortable waiting room chairs before me, the news they had received, the physicians who had looked at them with that dim, slow-mouthed way that we all had when trying to deliver bad news.  When the role was reversed and I was longer the bearer of bad news, I was unable to sit in those chairs.

My eyes focused on something different each time I sank to the floor. The clock. A chip in the paint of the wall. The dated art that matched other dated art in the hall by the elevator. A freckle between John Grey’s thumb and forefinger that I had never noticed before. The way John clasped his hands and bowed his head.

In waiting room time, every stubborn moment where my heels had dug in lost its importance.  

_Tom Christie. It had been a stupid hill to die on the night of the gala, and I hoped it was not my last stand. I needed Jamie to fight through this and live to fight with me another day._

I pulled myself up from the floor again, my heading spinning as I paced. The details of an unwelcomed half-life unraveled in my head.  In waiting room time, every fantasy not yet fulfilled ached and grew.  

A baby and then another. _(And if Jamie had his way, another and another and another yet again._ )

A short flight for a weekend holiday in Prague. Sitting in a café eating grapes that tasted like sun, swollen tomatoes that had the bite of earth to them, and too cold dry white wine.

A fix for the uneven stones in the path up to our front door. Coming home a hundred times without catching my toe in the brick to see him there, lounging with his glasses on or working at the kitchen table with his feet hooked around the legs of a chair.

A reservation at a swanky restaurant that we had been waiting weeks to try. Letting him order for me in French _(the sensuality of the syllables curving into one another)_ and walking to the car with my hand in the hip pocket of his pea coat.

An obedience class never scheduled to teach our dog not to jump on guests and to sit before we put his leash on for a walk. ( _The resultant well-mannered pooch that would sit, stay, roll over, play dead, shake, and fetch for both of us, but still loved his da more than his mum._ )

A head cold that allowed me to coddle him a little, to hold him and cook soup for him. A slight fever and runny noise that would result in an over-doctoring situation, our fingers bumping on the bell of my stethoscope over his heart. Though my career was built on my love affair with the machinations of the human body, there was something about listening to  _his body in particular_  that floored me.

A third movie in a trilogy not set for release for another eight months. Jamie’s patience as I asked him to remind me of the characters’ names, creeping fingers sneaking handfuls of the popcorn I had claimed not to want.

A squash harvested from my garden and sitting on the counter –– the promise of a night of watching him cook it with herbs and French butter, sipping wine, and making love.  

A new word in Gaelic to learn, to forget, to learn again. ( _Mumbled, sleepy phrases and adoring utterances that thrilled me into waking._ )

In waiting room time, there was eventually a moment where even the bleakest thoughts tripped over the limit of time into a black space where there is nothing more.

And with that tripping, came the realization of  _nothingness_.

The promise of a death or an injury so significant it would alter life forever, wipe the slate clean, and make the “future” nothing more than an unknowable abstraction.

Pacing over the carpet lost its allure and my legs went out from under me like rubber bands. I was on the floor, knees hugged close to my chest. My mind was testing its borders, about to sink into the blankness of the unknowable future and an internal academic debate about carpet wear patterns.  

Across an ocean and most of a continent, the carpet had been the same in my hospital until they removed it. ****

‘ _Funny that_ ,’ I thought, even though it was not even close to funny.

Jamie’s surgeon came out and I immediately searched for any sign that would tip me off to the words he had likely rehearsed in the walk to the waiting room. I was a student of this process, but I saw nothing in his face, posture, or gait. Pulling myself off of the floor, I found myself unsteady.  

John was at my side, a fact that caught me unaware when he wrapped an arm around me, his broad fingers curling around my upper arm to steady me.

I held my breath as the surgeon spoke.

“It went well.”

I swallowed, my fingers curling into the flesh of my thigh as a cold shiver of relief streaked down my spine.

“I did not need to extend the margins of the wound to clean out the affected tissue or bone. I irrigated it with several liters of saline to get all of the remaining grit out. The broken bone is well-aligned and it looks good. You know the drill –– he’s going to be in a splint until the fracture heals and will be pumped full of IV antibiotics for a while.”

I could breathe again. The surgeon’s hand was on my forearm.

“The circulating nurse will be by when you can see him in the postoperative care unit, Claire.”

Nodding, I suddenly understood the urge to hug a surgeon, but didn’t. My limbs had been struck too dumb to function.

 _Jamie’s hand (Jamie) was going to be okay_.

The first thing Jamie said to me hung in the air, shattering me completely. “ _A nighean_.”

I choked on the simplest of words (“ _hi_ ”).

The flicker of movement in his uninjured hand stripped back the thin veneer of control I had left.  All that remained were my exposed nerves.

“Is it over?”

“Yes.” Tears darted down my cheeks and I held his face in my hands.

In the post-operative haze, he smiled just slightly. My heart was bursting at that stupid turn of his lips. I wanted to kiss him everywhere, but settled for his cheek.His smile faded just as his eyelids began to drift closed. Without looking at me, he managed to slur, “The hand?”

“It’s okay.  _You’re_  going to be okay.” His head bobbed, just enough for me to know it was a  _nod_. “So will you quit saying you’re going to die now, you bloody Scot?”

“Hmmmm.  _Maybe_.” Something like a chuckle came from him as he said, “Once I can piss in a toilet instead of into a bag I’ll no’ mention it again.”

I barked out a laugh, meeting his attempt at a joke with a conciliatory “ _fine_.”

He was already asleep.


	10. Part Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Part Four, we learned how Jamie spent the day after he left on the business trip (stranded, injured). Here, we learn how Claire spent the day.

**Loss: Act II  
** **Part Ten**

Watching Jamie sleep, my mind wandered to the day after he left for his business trip.  It had started as one of those unremarkable days designed to be profound only in its ability to be meaningless as soon as it was over. An anonymous workday in a sequence of three hundred and sixty-five days, I had not appreciated the peace in assuming that it would blend into my memory as  _just another day_.

I woke Monday morning at 5:00 to  _nothing_  from Jamie. In Los Angeles, time was just rounding the corner to an hour that he would consider going to bed.  

It was early enough to get an answer.

Half asleep, I rolled onto my back, ignoring Buffalo Bill’s groaning protest and the fact that I had exactly forty minutes to get to the hospital. Chewing on my thumbnail, I frowned as his phone went directly to voicemail.  I left a deflated, rambling little message, asking him to call me back.

I stared at the last text I had from him:  _Beat the jet lag. Eating lots of ramen at the shop around the corner from the hotel. I’ve learned I like runny eggs on everything._   _You would hate it here. Going hiking with some guys from the LA office.  Tell me when it works to call you. I don’t want to wake you._  

I quickly typed out a series of messages, attempting to be coy.

First:

_I like runny eggs. Maybe enough to overcome the vapidity of LA. Do I need to dye my hair blonde to visit?_

Then, moments later:

_Call me whenever. Wake me up._

I wanted to purge the aftertaste of our argument from my mouth and decided to  _banter_ :

_Maybe you won’t like the idea of me as a blonde? Or maybe you like it **too much**? Out with it Fraser. (Really, call me whenever. If I’m wrists-deep in human, I just won’t answer.)_

Nothing.

I sent one final message before getting ready for the day:

_I’m going to work. ILY. xx._

Driving to the hospital, I found myself getting irritated at his silence. By the time I parked, the irritation had blossomed into anger that infiltrated my vision and glowed red hot behind my eyes.

I did rounds. I yelled at a resident who had ordered a drug contraindicated by our patient’s other medications and would have sent the patient on an expense-paid, non-refundable trip to the morgue.  I scrubbed my skin almost raw while prepping for surgery. I listened to screaming, hard music while operating on an ankle busted up by a lacrosse game.

After we closed the patient and cleared the operating room, Geillis waded into the bog of my fury. “‘Tis  _verra_  aggressive music ye chose today. Rage Against the Machine was it? Something amiss at home? Ye ken what helps when I feel that  _aggressive_?”

I had looked at her, releasing a swarm of curls from my scrub cap, muttering, “No.”

“I’ll tell ye nonetheless.  A good  _hate fuck––_ ”

“Geillis.” I popped a mint between my lips and rolled my eyes, having long since lost any capacity to be surprised by anything that came out of her mouth. “No.”

“Oh, Claire. It’s no’ healthy to harbor that kind of  _anger_. Think of yer cardiac and mental health. Fuck it out wi’ yer man, and ye’ll see.”

Powering my phone back on, I typed another quick message to Jamie. ( _Starting to worry here; call? On lunch now_.)

“Quick shower? Then lunch?” she asked airly, tying her long sheet of strawberry blonde hair into a top knot.

“Yes and yes.”

Over a shared club sandwich in the hospital cafeteria, I told Geillis the whole sordid tale of the gala two nights earlier.  About Tom. About Jamie ( _his iciness_ ). About what happened when we got home.  About the guestroom and the half-hearted kiss goodbye. When she called him a “prick,” I had the good grace to feel guilty. But I came to his defense only weakly, half-heartedly saying, “don’t say that; I don’t even say that.”

After lunch, and on the way to my office, I snuck into an alcove and called Jamie’s hotel. Realizing it was roughly 4:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, I grudgingly declined the front desk attendant’s request to be put through to his room.  With only a mild objection based on “guest privacy,” the clerk confirmed that he had seen the “Scotland group” come back the hotel after a hike.

“Fuck you, Jamie,” I had muttered as I ended the call and slid the phone into the pocket of my scrubs. Adopting Geillis’ nomenclature, I added, “ _Prick_.”

Elbow-deep in paperwork, I met with the catalyst of my marital conflagration mid-day when Tom Christie came to my office without knocking. He was armed with a stack of spreadsheets, an almond milk latté, and a scone.

“Are you attempting to drown me in paperwork?” I asked, reaching for the coffee with one hand and using the other to wave off the scone with a reedy protest. “That’s a  _lot_  of mid-day sugar. I’ll crash.”

“We can split it,” he offered, sitting at my desk and immediately setting about dividing it with a plastic knife. “Your man had some reaction to me, huh?”

It felt  _wrong_  to laugh ( _like a betrayal –– to the man I loved, the vows I swore to, the gravity of our argument over the whole thing_ ), but a half-chuckle rose from the mire of my annoyance with said man. “I don’t have anything even  _approaching_  a comment about that, Tom.”

Although from his blank face it appeared that Tom had ignored me, the hint of a smile playing on his lips said he was fully tuned in to me.  

“ _There_. Perfect halves,” he commented blandly as he slid part of the scone across the desk to me. “Seems like an equitable division of baked goods.”

I pressed a fingertip into the rock sugar crystals littering the paper napkin under the scone.  A small sigh slipped unbidden from my lips as I sweetness erupted across my tongue.

“Worth the carbs and sugar?” Tom raised a single eyebrow and gave me a disconcertingly penetrating look.

I shifted in my seat at the intensity of the look, turning my attention back to my scone.  “I’ll let you know when I’m slamming a Snickers bar into my gaping maw later to chase the sugar high through the last rounds of the day.”

“Tell you what. If you find yourself turning into a zombie, give me a call. I’ll come running with that Snickers.”

“Deal,” I agreed, biting into the scone with unabashed delight.

“I know him; did you know?”

“What?” I licked crumbs from my lips, brows furrowing and the taste of the scone going stale on my tongue.

“Your  _lad_.” And as if I had more than one ‘lad,’ Tom unnecessarily clarified. “Your  _Fraser_.”

The scone was suddenly too dry in my mouth and I took a too-large gulp of too-hot coffee, managing to slurp not an insignificant amount down the front of my top. I cursed under my breath, grabbing for one of the napkins Tom had put in the center of my desk. “However do you know each other?”

“Well, that’s a story your husband is probably best equipped to share with you. We were not… I don’t know if I should say.”

“ _Say_ ,” I directed him, voice firm as I forgot about the stain setting in down the front of my clothing.

Tom ineffectually began to wipe at the puddle of coffee on my desk with a single napkin. “Military.  We served in Afghanistan together. That last tour did not end so well for him. Neither did our relationship, really.”

My stomach plummeted to my feet and my lips parted a little. “What happened?”

Wiping his hands on his suit pants, Tom just shook his head. “This and that.”

“What does  _that_ mean?”

Tom clicked his tongue; the small smile had morphed into something wider and toothier.  “Am I being cross examined? I thought this was a  _friendly_  visit, Dr. Beauchamp.”

“Dr. Beauchamp- _Fraser_ ,” I amended for him, my voice icier than the tone I usually reserved to correct people on the relatively new addition to my last name.  

“I beg your pardon,” he said, laughing a little, holding up his hands in mock defeat.

In the middle of giving him my most probing look, my phone started to ring, and I nearly dove across my desk to answer it. My heart plummeted when Joe greeted me.  

Tom stood, giving me an anemic thumbs up before sweeping errant sugar crystals and crumbs into his palm.  Shaking my head, I pointed at the chair and glared. ‘ _Sit_ ,’ I mouthed, sincerely thinking about hanging up on Joe. ‘ _Not done._ ’

Dumping his palm-full of crumbs into the wastepaper basket, Tom just shrugged and walked out of my office.  

At home, having turned down Joe’s invitation for happy hour, I sat on the couch with my phone on my chest. Jamie was likely in meetings, discussing sneakers and marketing budgets, color stories and demographics to target. My finger hovered his contact information and I finally tossed my phone down with a hissed string of curse words. I had no idea what I was going to say to him in light of my new information.  

Only when my stomach started growling near 7:00 did I venture to the refrigerator to see what was there.  What I saw made a tidal wave of emotion swell in my belly.  Layered in even stacks were a number of plastic containers with taped, handwritten labels.  Somehow without my realizing it, Jamie had assembled a series of dinners and left them in the refrigerator for me.  Chopped cilantro. Diced onions. Pineapple salsa.  Lime wedges.  Grilled vegetables. Carnitas.  Corn tortillas.

On the top of the cilantro was a post-it note:

_Tacos for my wee taco connoisseur/best lass._

_Don’t eat only Thai takeout while I’m away._

_We can eat all the Thai takeout you want when I get home._

_Love you (a lot) & etc.,_

_J_

_Postscriptum: All that’s left for you to handle is the avocado. It’ll be rotten before I make it to the airport if I pre-cut it for you. Be careful and just say ‘no’ if you’ve had even a glass of wine. You’re a superstar at cutting humans and a disaster cutting anything in the kitchen. You’ll need all those bonny fingers when I get home._

Pulling the note off of the lid, I sank to the floor, pulled my knees to my chest and pressed my face against the heels of my hands. To no one other than myself and the dog, I muttered, “Jesus Christ, I love you even when I can’t stand you.” ****

After a time, I rose and started to slice avocado to layer into the tacos.

The phone call I received next, though, changed that day, marking it as one that I would never forget.  

Over a mouthful of half-chewed, refrigerator-chilled vegetables, I answered the vibrating screech of my mobile, putting it immediately on speakerphone. “John, what’s up?”  

His breath filled the line, heavy and even, but only for a moment. My heart stopped.  _I knew_  before he said anything.  _I just knew_. It was  _Jamie_. Something was  _wrong_.“Claire, I don’t know how to say this. I’m just… I’m going to say it.”

“ _Say it_ ,” I said unnecessarily, as if he required my prodding.

“Jamie’s been hurt hiking.  He fell.”

In a moment, the hours of  _just another day_ branded themselves into my brain with exquisite detail.  The operating room music.  Geillis’ hair.  The text messages.  The containers of taco accoutrements.  Tom Christie with his prematurely greying hair and tilted smirk.  The scone.  The smell of my husband on the t-shirt I put on after work, rising up around me with his name on John’s tongue.

John’s tone said it all.

 _It was bad_.

‘Put the knife down,’ my brain commanded me. I complied with the directive and the knife fell to the cutting board with a metallic clang.

“Claire, are you listening?”

John said my name again and again. I swallowed, attempting to speak. “ _Huh_?”

“Jamie. He is in the hospital. Just outside of L.A.”

My brain beseeched my tongue to move, my throat to scream, my lungs to work, but none cooperated. In the marrow of my bones, I was convinced that I knew what dying felt like.  _It was that feeling_  –– a shimmering, silver spider web weaving its way through the bits that made me human with the sole purpose of suffocating the life out of me _._

John said it again and again and I needed him to  _stop_. I needed to yell at him to quit saying it,  _to give me a fucking second_ , until my voice cracked.

“Why you?” I croaked over the word.

He hesitated a beat before asking, “What?”

My brain was skipping from here to there, back again –– the first night I met Jamie ( _that distillery tour_ ), our wedding ( _running down the aisle to kiss without dozens of eyes watching us_ ), our first fight ( _fucking IKEA_ ), the shape of the scar on his ribs ( _bottle cap_ ), the way he held me when we decided to try for a baby ( _firm, reverent, awed by my body in a new way_ ), how he always mixed up jokes that he learned from other people ( _always the wrong number of whoever walking into the bar, extraneous characters who were irrelevant to the punchline_ ).

“Claire? What do you mean by ‘ _why_ ’?”

“Why are  _you_  calling me? I’m his wife. Why didn’t they call me?”

It was entirely beside the point, but my brain fixated on the fact as I attempted to come up with a way to respond to the  _real_  news without self-destructing.  “Andrew said that Human Resources did not have the right number for you –– Jamie put it into the paperwork wrong or something. They were hiking. Jamie split off from the group to give you a call. He didn’t show up this morning for their first meeting.”

I  _laughed_ , sick and unable to muster any other response.  My mind had snapped and become unable to wrap itself around another sound.

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t…” I swallowed hard against the saliva flooding my mouth.  _I was going to vomit_.  “I just texted him. And the front desk guy… I mean, at the hotel, he said that the ‘ _Scotland guys_ ’ came back.”

“Claire, hang on.”  The rustle of fabric crackled over the line. John’s voice was muffled but clear as he said, “I don’t know  _what_  to do. It’s like she isn’t tracking what I’m saying.”

“I am.”  The flatness of my affect shocked even me. I looked down. My hands were curled around the edge of the counter, knuckles gone white. “I  _am_  tracking and my world…”

 _I couldn’t breathe_.  _My world was burning, ending. This was my last stand._

“I’m coming over. I’m bringing a bag and I’m going to go with you. Can you pack a bag?”

As I went to my knees, I shook my head as if he were able to see me. John was too calm, too collected.  _If this were real, John would never be this calm.  It had to be a dream._ ( _It wasn’t_.)  

My small voice announced a series of letters that made a sound that was hardly a word. ( _Mmmmhm_.)

“Christ. Hang on. Thirty minutes. David is looking for plane tickets and we’ll come get you. It’s going to be…”

“ _Don’t lie to me_ ,” I barked, my hand immediately clamping over my mouth.  It was most certainly  _not_  going to be  _okay_.

When John had hung up, I had started to scream.

A spasm, deep and hard in my neck, pulled me out of my moment-by-moment recollection of that day and dropped me back into my new reality.

 _This hospital.  Jamie hooked up to a PCA for pain control. The bruise blooming across his cheek. His still-open leg and freshly-closed hand_.

“Ye’ve been dozin’ on and off, Sassenach.”

Pain coursed in waves from the edge of my shoulder to the underside of one ear and wrapped along the curve of my skull to the other ear. Moving just a little, my makeshift pillow ( _a sweater_ ) fell to the floor and I sighed, fingers scrabbling along the floor as I tried to grab it. “Yeah, well… long day.”

“Ye need to go.”

Shaking my head, I adjusted myself in the seat. “You’re awake. Let’s talk.”

The sun had long slunk down beneath the horizon to bathe the desert in silver-blue moonlight by the time Jamie woke again. “I am awake, and you need to leave, Claire. Go get some sleep.”

Blinking hard and ignoring the directive, I took stock of him. He was just barely sitting up with his injured hand hovering over his chest. His skin was still a riotous, sunburned pink and his nose was just beginning to peel. His lips were chapped and cracked, but smeared in a permanent layer of petroleum jelly. A bruise had started to bloom along his right cheekbone, curling up to his temple. He looked like he  _hurt_ , but like someone who had just been seriously injured  and whose pain was well controlled.

“Talk to me about how you’re feeling.”

“A bit worse for wear, if I’m honest. Hand’s worse than the rest.” He glanced down at his wrapped hand, lifting it a little and inspecting the swell of bandages around it. “Truth be told, though, I’m more worried about how  _you’re_  feeling. Ye’ve been here since early morning. How are ye feelin’?”

“King of men  _and_  king of understatement,” I mumbled, leaning forward to rest my elbows on the bed.

“I  _asked_  how ye were feelin’.”

I had to swallow and blink before speaking. I felt like a natural disaster, but answered, “Better now that one of those two open fractures is closed up.”

He hummed a little, plainly unconvinced by the answer. “Where’s Buffalo Bill?”

The question was so absurd that I could not stop myself from laughing. “He’s with David.”

“Good.” His face relaxed a bit. “He’s my best lad.”

“Excuse me?”

“The dog… he’s my bud. You’re  _everything_ , but that dog’s the main squeeze.”

“Good to know.” My words were slurred.

“Please. Go get some good sleep. I texted John. He’s coming back for ye. This isna sustainable.”

“I don’t want to leave you.” I scooted the chair closer to his bedside, grimacing at the scraping noise it made over the tile. It was almost as if by leaving, time would fall in on itself and history would be revised. Jamie would be back in that ambulance, his heart stopping, and it would never start again.  “If something happens… I…”

Swallowing, I realized I was too tired to fight the tears, so I let them come. With a single, barking sob, I was uncorked and crying openly.

“If I lose you…” My voice trailed off. “Jamie, you have  _no idea_  what that will do to me.”

He studied me for a long moment before choking, “C’mere. I need ye more than I need to be comfortable.”

Sucking in a breath, I realized Dr. Beauchamp-Fraser was nowhere to be found. With common sense wholly discarded, I stretched myself out along the narrowest sliver of the bed possible, bringing my fingers to rest over his heart. “Still beating.”

A great, shuddering exhale shook his chest and the fingers of his uninjured hand wove their way into my hair. “From here on out, dinna waste our time fearing loss. I canna bear it.”


	11. Part Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie's perspective as he wakes and a fundamental reconnection.

##  **Loss: Act II  
** **Part Eleven ** _(Jamie’s Point of View)_****

_Strange. The things you remember. The people. The places. The moments in time, burned into your heart forever, while others fade in the mist. I’ve always known I’ve lived a life different from other men. And when I was a lad, I saw no path before me. I simply took a step and then another. Ever forward. Ever onward. Rushing towards some place I knew not where.  And one day, I turned around and looked back and saw that each step I’d taken was a choice. To go left. To go right. To go forward. Or even not go at all. Every day, every man has a choice. Between right and wrong.  Between love and hate.  Sometimes, between life and death. And the sum of those choices become your life._

The constructs of reality and time were incomprehensible to me.  The fact that they had once been real was at the same time undeniable and unfathomable.  Generally, hours were carefully measured by a watch, the pieces of my day pre-destined for certain purposes.  Days were doled out into weekdays and weekends, organized on a calendar.

Choice after choice. Life and death. Forward or not to go at all.

On my back in the desert and then an ambulance. Knee-deep in puddles of white light, commands to  _breathe_  and  _don’t you fucking die on me_. The hollow cavern of my chest silent, heart having stopped, the quiet mumble of Claire next to me. Her fingers were wound into the front of her wedding dress, worrying the lace.  The quiet, leaking crimson saturating the fabric from the place where we had made our blood oath. Eyes cast down at her hands, she said, “ _I need you_.”

Gasping, I reached for her. Without touching me, she placed a  _choice_  in my hand. It had mass to it –– a sphere that fit in the palm of my hand. Heavy.  Smooth. Milky with the thousands of memories made and a thousand more yet to be.

 _Life. Death. A choice to be made_.

“ _Choose me, Jamie._ ”

And then I chose to fight. It was the only choice that would lead me to her. To life. Our life.

Again and again, I chose it.

I woke. She was  _real_. She was  _there_. By the hospital bed – disheveled, folded in on herself, halfway across the globe from where I had left her.

A surgery –– the decay of my hand threatening to undo us.

 _As I came out of the haze of the operation, I realized that she was tired. So tired and broken._  I could hardly bear the sight of her –– eyes dark from sleeplessness and dull, hair greasy, stained by coffee, pale. I never wanted to see her like that again.

I told her to leave, but instead she climbed onto the bed next to me.

She was  _real_. Not the kind of real conjured in a sick, spiraling mind that is desperate to cling to life. The kind of real tangible real that responded to touch and had breath bursting to break free of lungs. She was  _present_.

Time lost all its remaining meaning with Claire curled against me on that hospital bed. The gentle curve of her waist into the swell of her hip was like home. And if I closed my eyes, gave myself to the drugs she had insisted on, it was almost as though the world had righted itself.

I could feel  _us_  again where before there had been a question mark.

The promise of togetherness.

Her tears saturated my hospital gown –– hot and clean. They felt somehow necessary. When her fingers ran over my cheeks, they came away sparkling with tears I had no idea I was shedding.  I sighed. I was aching ( _in the pit of my stomach, situated well below the pain of my injuries_ ) with the realization of what we almost lost.

I pictured our life again. Our  _old_  life. Our  _new_  one. I asked ( _told_ ) her not to live in fear of loss.And then the words simply  _flooded_  from her, a rambling tangle:  _I love you. I need you. We need forever._

I closed my eyes, an attempt to divine a world without the metronomic beep of the monitors hooked up to my body. Their cadence blurred from the steady ticking away of the moments of our life together into white noise.

 _Sorcha_.

I coughed.  Pain erupted like smoldering coals running the perimeter of my rib cage. Throbbing along my sternum made me groan and arch my back just slightly, desperate for a reprieve from the weight of it.  I kept my eyes closed, trying to stave off the wave of nausea that I knew was about to make my mouth sweat and go sour, the muscles in my face draw taut.

Before the cough, I could not imagine that the pain could get worse. After the cough, I knew it was only a matter of time.

 _Christ I hurt_.  _Everywhere_. From my toes to the tips of my hair. The ache in my hand radiated into my wrists, my forearms, my elbows, my upper arms, shoulders, neck. It wrapped around the base of my skull –– insidious fingers sinking through my flesh, curling around bone, going deep into the soft tissue below.

“Press the button,” the soft bundle of my wife whispered, taking too much care not to touch me. “You need it.”

‘ _Be closer_ ,’ I yearned to beg. ‘ _Fuck the pain, just get nearer._ ’

On a cellular level, I wanted her to wrap legs around my waist, to tuck her face into my neck, to slide her arms around my chest, to press the soft weight of her breasts full along my chest. I wanted her close enough that through the thinnest skin on our bodies, I could feel her pulse.  

It was not the need to take her, blind with wanting. Rather, I just needed to be  _near_  her. Through her touch, I was whole again.The sliver of my brain that remained logical, quietly humming along with even a mild sense of self-preservation, rejected the plan to draw her close. However, the vast majority of my brain was begging for the pain if it meant that we could just be close.

John peeked around the corner into my room, looking almost as tired as Claire. I shook my head, needing the moment to last even just bit longer. Time was slowly coming to have meaning again. Giving me a short nod, he stepped away.

The pain medicine was a slow seduction. With the relief, I could feel my heart slowing, my mind clearing, my blood turning to syrup, my tongue thickening, and my very bones turning to putty.

“You need sleep. I’ll go soon.” Her voice was small in a way that I had never heard it. “I don’t mean to put this on you, but today has been hard. And I want to feel you for a while.”

“Ye’re  _fine_.” I strained a little, unable to get my head to turn the way I wanted it to. I could have cried at the basic demand building in my brain me to press my face into that head of soft curls, to kiss her scalp. I settled for running my fingers over her cheek, my arm contorted into an awkward position.

She inhaled a deep, shuddering breath, her face angling towards me. Her skin looked almost grey in the fluorescent light coming in from the hallway.

“John’s here.”

“Just a few minutes,” she replied hoarsely. Her voice sounded like it was ready to collapse under the weight of our day.  I nodded.  _We both needed time_. It came from a mutual yearning for nearness and my unsteady reintroduction to the concept of time.

She swallowed, licking her lips as tension seemed to leak out of her. “Ye’re beautiful,” I whispered, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Too tired, but sae beautiful. Ten minutes?”

“Ten minutes,” she slurred, coming closer. She was gravity itself. For the first time that day I realized that under the layered odors of stale hospital coffee, hospital itself, and pungent chemical industrial laundry soap, she smelled like  _me_. My shampoo. My body wash. My deodorant. I closed my eyes, breathing in deeply and trying to find the smell of  _her_ beneath it all.

I tried to recall the smell of our bedroom. ( _It came to me after a time._   _The thick aroma of chamomile, mandarin, bergamot, and lavender. Oils that she started mixing after I woke convinced I was back in Afghanistan one night, clawing at the sheets with frenzied fingertips. She drew greasy lines of it on our bedsheets for a time until she bought a diffuser for my nightstand. The sharp, clean scent of our blankets. The lived in smell of our closet –– lingering perfume and flowery detergent._ )

“I have a hard time sleeping without you.” She kissed the back of my hand, thumb pressed over the pulse point in my wrist. The gesture was intimate enough that I opened my eyes. I wanted to be awake for her, even though I knew there was little I could do that would make her happier than if I were to sleep.

My voice was scarcely a murmur when I said, “Ye’re thinkin’ of home, aren’t ye?”

Her eyes closed, as if she was letting herself be drawn in by the image of it. But they snapped opened, blinking hard and like pooling honey as she nodded. “Yes.”

“I can tell from the look on yer face. Ye’re calm. Maybe for the first time today.” My fingers were a little more insistent on her cheek then, thumb tracing her cheekbone. I wondered where in the hell I could find a tissue to dry her face. I wanted to kiss her clammy skin, tell her things would be  _okay_. “ _Tell me_.”

I closed my eyes, somehow knowing that she was closing hers, too. Her voice was  _hers_ , but ethereal. It had the smooth, even rhythm of a storyteller. “We’re in bed. Forget the way this place smells and sounds. Think of those oils. Everything in that bed smells like them. And it’s autumn. We open that window and it gets too cool, but instead of closing it we put that extra blanket onto the bed.”

“The one that doesna match the bedding.” ( _The mismatched blanket had been a surprising source of a meltdown at the end of a workday a few weeks earlier. I will maintain until the day that I die that she started off snippy and I responded in kind._ )

The sound of her laugh was  _almost_  as effective at alleviating the pain as the medication meandering through the IV and mingling with my blood. ( _Though I was as possessed with my wife as I was the day I met her, I was still a realist. She was good, but not narcotic painkiller good._ ) “ _Right_.”

With my eyes closed, I almost felt myself there. At home.  The rush of warm air as we pulled the covers over our heads, whispering about our days before we fell silent. Our mouths becoming otherwise occupied and our hands drawing sounds from one another instead of words, we became one.

Her fingers traced feather light along my chest, like she was searching for something. I concentrated on memorizing the level march of her breath and the flat swipe of her touch over my throat and then jaw.

“Do you see it? I mean, in your mind.” Her voice was barely a whisper as her fingers stilled. “Home.”

I wanted to stay awake, to let myself be swept away in her soft, lilting accent. A sound came from me –– a hybrid of  _mmmhmmm_  and some other series of tones.

“And of course the dog is settled at the end of the bed. You’re doing your best not to get cross with him. It’s like sleeping with another person.”

“Smelly beast,” I managed, only realizing the long, sloping pause between the end of her statement and my words after I spoke. I tried to open my eyes. I failed. My brain was slowing, crawling through her narration of our life.

She exhaled, her voice breathy and ethereal “ _bloody hell, he does smell_.”

“Home. What else about it?”

Her fingertips, my cheeks. I could not see her, but I had memorized the feeling of her touch the first time she had reached for me in the night while she slept. Everything  _hurt_. But the pain had dulled, and I did not care anymore.

“Coffee. I can’t make it without you there, but coffee makes it home. When our schedules line up, I love drinking it. Together.”

The thought of her was beautiful, but I wanted one final look at her before I drifted away. I tried to open my eyes. I wanted to see her, to see it cross her face – her recollection of our ritual exercise in caffeinating ourselves for the day. Together.  Through hardly-opened eyes, I saw her. She was studying me –– a little lost, plainly stressed out, and alone even though she was with me. I wanted to make it better, but was failing. I wondered in a vague way what scars I would carry with me from this. More shapes carved into my body for her to learn.

“The way you look at me when we stand there at the counter together…”

Her voice caught.

 _Fuck_.

Despite the fight in me to stay awake for her, I was slipping away. I could tell from her voice that she was crying.

I wondered how many tears she could possibly have left inside of her.

“I’ve never really thought about it or said it, but that look makes me feel  _beloved_ , Jamie.”

I was so tired, but something about responding felt elemental to our future. “Ye are.”

My uninjured hand yearned to fill itself with the soft curve of her cheek.

My injured hand had ceased to exist entirely, leaving behind only a phantom ache to brush the hair off of her forehead.

I wanted to kiss her goodnight, full and on the lips.

I wanted to make love to her, to feel her warm and soft around me and to hear her slur my name, come drunk and undone down to her very DNA.

I was not sure if I said it, but I thought:  _You are beloved._


	12. Part Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The identification of hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to those of you hanging with me. I've had a bumpy few weeks of real life and words were not flowing. They're back now. I hope this was worth the wait. <3

##  **Loss: Act II  
****Part Twelve**

_The night that I had learned about Jamie’s journals was a date night. He had taken me out for dinner and drinks.  In turn, I had taken him to the cinema to see a movie that kept him far more interested than it had me. Coming home, I had washed the smell of popcorn and sweets off of myself while he settled into bed.  When I came out of the shower, he was leaning against the headboard with a stack of pillows under his arm.  His thumb worried his lower lip and he was turning a pen over his knuckles again and again._

_“You’re awfully deep in thought,” I commented absently, perching myself on my knees at the end of the bed. “What are you doing?”_

_“Journaling,” he said quietly, tucking the pen into the binding and flipping the cover closed.  His hand rested gently, almost reverently, over the worn cognac leather. His initials were burnished into the corner._

_I had touched the journal before, wondered about its contents, but had never breached the trust he had to just leave it out on his nightstand._

_“I didn’t know that you journaled.” It was true. I had just figured it contained work notes –– fantastical things that flowed from his story teller’s brain when he rolled over after a dream, his ideas written down to be packaged up for consumption by The Man._

_“Hmmmm.”  His lips curved slightly as he wrapped the cord around the swollen middle of the journal. “Every day. Since I started school. I had terrible penmanship.  It was a habit that my mam instilled in me. It’s rare that I miss a day.”_

_We had been together for almost nine months.  Having lived together only a few short time, were still getting used to one another –– learning how he loaded the dishwasher, how sharing a bed with him at the end of the night made the insanity of a day fade away, how he had an almost chronic disinterest in cleaning save for a meticulous scrubbing of the kitchen anytime he cooked._

_Though there was still a thrill to learning the bits of one another still in shadow, some of the novelty of being together had faded to a comfortable rhythm._

**_This_ ** _, though, **the journals** ––the idea was new and it made me nosy._

_As I reached to fold down the corner of duvet on my side of the bed Jamie gently caught my wrist. “Stop.”_

_“Pardon?” My entire body stilled as he rose, leaning towards me, into me.  First, his teeth captured my ear lobe. Then, he maneuvered me, without protest, onto my back to be prone beneath him._

_“That nightgown… it’s near see through when ye catch the light, Claire.”_

_“Oh,” I said dumbly, my lower lip between my teeth as his left hand found my thigh and worked its way north rather gracelessly.  With one half of the nightgown rucked up about my waist, he wormed his hand beneath me to cup my buttocks._

_“I can see ye naked through it, yer wet hair heavy, curling around yer breasts…” He squeezed me and I mewled, searching for his mouth. “Nothing underneath yer ridiculous nightie… and that dress ye wore… Christ. I couldna keep my eyes off of ye tonight.”_

_I reached for his waistband and he just clicked his tongue, scraping his teeth down my jaw._

_“Ye drive me wild. I’ve had a cockstand since we got to the movies. Ye bent over to grab that receipt and yer ass. Ye’ve the roundest, finest ass in the United Kingdom.”_

_Of course, I had known exactly what I was doing grabbing the receipt, bent at the waist and inches from him. Reveling in the promise of his rough hands, I aimed for coyness and played dumb. “You seemed to enjoy the movie well enough, though. Stupid explosions and too many automobile chases and––”_

_“It was **fine**.” There was a finality in his tone that told me he was well beyond engaging in any postmortem of the movie. He moved again, his body looming over me –– very big, very warm, and smelling of desire. As if there had been any question about his intention he said, “I mean to end this weekend on a high note. Do you have any reservations about this plan?”_

_Any questions I had about his journaling faded to meaningless syllables knocking about my brain as I shook my head. “It’s a good plan,” I mumbled. “No reservations.”_

_“Good,” he snorted in response, knees nudging my legs apart. “How?”_

_I ached for him already –– the fluttering in my stomach turning into a twisting anticipation as his fingers cupped me. Wanting nothing more than to see the effect I had on him, I wanted him to take me however his mind had imagined it would be best. “Dealer’s choice.”_

_He paused, apparently second guessing his plan of attack, and rose abruptly. Slipping his pajama pants down, he took himself in hand. My stomach flipped. He was smiling, only just._

_“Now, Sassenach.” His eyes were intent, studying me with an intensity that made my hand flutter to my exposed stomach –– heaving chest, one breast threaded through the neck of my nightgown, legs splayed, fingers curling into the duvet. His thumb ghosted over the end of his cock –– slow, thoughtful._ _To be wanted by him, to want him, was almost overwhelming. I was trembling, shamelessly needing him to be inside of me. “On yer knees, a nighean_. _Now_.”

_I was still deep in the haze of the things he had done to my body –– humming and limp, curled against his chest. With loose limbs draped over him (ones likely unable to bear weight until morning), I returned to the journals. “Do I make an appearance in these journals of yours?” My tone was quiet, teasing, but I wanted to know._

_“Of course ye do.” His lips moved along my scalp as he spoke and he placed a purposeful kiss at my crown. “Ye’re the most important thing… **person** … in my life. Ye’re in there an awful lot.”_

_Swallowing, I traced the pink-brown circumference of one of his nipples. Marveling at the way it immediately pebbled beneath my touch, I forged onward. “And?”_

_“ **And** I wrote about ye the first time I met ye.  And the second. And the third. And then after the first night we spent together. While ye slept. And after ye left a day and a half later.” _

_I felt sleep threatening to betray my curiosity, to prematurely end my inquiry. “What did you write about me?”_

_The pause was long. We had not established much in the way of boundaries, but his silence made me wonder if I had crossed into an uncharted and off limits territory. Just as I was about to say that he did not have to answer, he did. “I wrote that I wanted to let ye in. That wouldna fight feeling what I felt for ye. Ever. That I kent it was likely **love** that I had for ye.” _

I woke disoriented.  The room was pitch black ( _like home_ ), but the mattress was too firm, too tight beneath me. The blankets did not have the heady spice and citrus of home. The space next to me was unoccupied.

_A hotel._

_In California._

It was too-cold –– the air conditioning, the absence of my live-in furnaces ( _human and canine_ ). I was alone.

When I woke, I had been in the middle of a dream that I would never remember in fuller detail.

 _His journals, a kiss good morning, a not entirely unpleasant feeling of expectation in my belly_. _Waking in the middle of the night, silver shapes drawn by moonlight over his body. He was whole._

Although restful, my slumber had been plagued by dreams that feel uncertain upon waking. Memories with Jamie, from a lifetime earlier. Called up in sleep and dissolving as my eyes fluttered open. Fully awake, only the dusty footprints of the dream remained.

Goosebumps exploded on my flesh as I sat up, stomach growling and the duvet falling to my waist. I slipped out of the bed and checked my watch through sleepy, narrowed eyes. I had slept for an uninterrupted five-hour stretch.

In thirty-six hours, I felt as though I had aged at least a year.  I had no sense of when I had received that phone call from John, of when I had first felt fear at the prospect of losing him, of when I had taken a seat on that insufferably long plane ride across the Atlantic and an entire continent. ( _The worry of hours at 34,000 feet without much in the way of news from California_ _making me crazy_.)

I made a half-hearted attempt to remember the last time I had something more than coffee in my stomach as I ruffled my pillow-smushed hair back to life. My back popped with a satisfying series of cracks as I stretched. Though I was rested, I felt like I had been hit by a train.

Pulling open the blackout curtains, I realized that the world that had gone greyscale with John’s phone call had slowly started to accept color again.  Street lights glowed amber against a starless, endless sky. My reflection in the window was a mix of pale skin and almost violently pink pillow creases across my cheeks. Serrated edges of palm trees cut in verdant green against the first touch of early sunrise.

The seemingly interminable span of hours from the day before in which I had myself convinced that I would lose Jamie were at my back. Something different stretched out in front of me; it was something that had taken the place of fear.

It was _hope_.  New and raw. Not yet the hope of an Emily Dickinson poem, feathered and perched in my soul.  It was tender and green, still growing roots and supportive structures, tentatively seeking sun. But it was _there_.

The parts of me that had been lost in the storm had brokered a delicate compromise to return. To stitch me back together, so I could be strong for Jamie. My ability to envision a future, my ability to think straight, my very heart.  ( _Lord knew that he would need some strength in the days to come. While he had said to me time and again that he could bear his own pain, I could not bear for him to go through it alone._ )

The chanting _what if, what if, what if_ and all of its dark eventualities was lost. A brighter prospect replaced it –– _this, here, now_.  Curled against Jamie the night before, feeling his heart beat and his breath warm my skin, I had closed my eyes and dared to picture it.

Our life resuming.

My cheeks forgetting the sensation of tears.

My eyes brightening at the sight of him or the feel of him, sleep creased and wanting. Walking next to one another in the first snow, our hands twined together and shoulders bumping ( _accidentally, on purpose, again, again, once more_ ).

Arguing over whose turn it was to change the bedding before silently compromising and doing it together ( _only to muss the sheets and duvet as we made up_ ).

Watching him rise to half of his height as we sat at our usual bistro table on a Sunday morning, sipping coffee and laughing at each other ( _over some inside joke created through a look or a face, the rest of the café_ _oblivious to our world_ ).

Feeling the swell in my throat crowd out any words as he leaned over the table towards me, pushing my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose with a single finger. Kissing me, eyes open, breath draped with the bite of bitter coffee.

My life.  My home.  Our lives. Our home.

‘ _They are going to be there_ ,’ that green thing of hope said. ‘ _Just you wait and see_.’

An almost-scalding shower and an hour later, John and I were on our way back to the hospital in the rental car. He hummed along to the radio and I studied his profile. If he took notice of my inspection, he didn’t say anything. Hardly thinking about the gesture before I did it, I reached out a hand.  With my fingers on his air conditioning-chilled forearm, I suddenly realized ( _maybe for the first time_ ) what kind of man John Grey was.

“You’re a good friend. Not just to Jamie. To the both of us.”

It was something that I had _known_ for almost as long as I had known him, but had never appreciated until that moment. The world around me smeared into a monolith –– concrete road barriers, soaring exit ramps that blocked the sky, street lights, other vehicles, palm trees. My brain was finally _still_.

“For being here, I mean. With Jamie.  With _me_. For _us_.”

John cleared his throat as he took one hand off of the wheel to cover my fingers. “There’s nowhere else I’d be, Claire.”

Jamie was asleep when we arrived.

After checking in with his nurse ( _one I had not yet met_ ) to get what amounted to a shift report, I settled myself back in the chair next to his bed. He looked peaceful and with the information I had gathered, I _felt_ peaceful.

He was stable through the night and had willingly accepted pain control.  His blood pressure was within normal limits and had the night shift nurse laughing at a joke. ( _The nurse’s words were boundless in my head ––_ “ _and he talked about you.” My heart fluttering, absolutely crazed in my chest –– “about your home; kept saying that he has his own personal doctor to take care of him.”_ )

Against my better judgment _(not wanting to wake him)_ , I traced a finger along his jaw, resting it in the bearded dimple of his chin. ( _The nurse, smiling warmly and tucking the lab report I had reviewed back into the bin on the work station. “He’s lucky to have you.” I had just shaken my head. No. It was the other way around._ ) The growth on his chin was springy beneath my fingertips.  Any pretense of merely calling his face “ _stubbled_ ” had faded.

By all medical measures, he was a fighter. A bloody scrappy one at that.

My voice was a whisper lost in the click and tick and clack of monitors, but I said it, just to bury it somewhere in his subconscious: “ _Hey you. It’s going to be okay._ ”

I wondered, vaguely, if we would be here for our first Thanksgiving. _I hoped not_. I wanted to take my husband home –– to Scotland, to the house we bought because I had an urge wrought by my imagination.  That place had become our passion project. And somewhere inside of me, undoubtedly a selfish corner where my thoughts were unbundled and riotous, I wanted to be the one to take care of him.  I knew his body better than I knew my own. I knew his sounds –– the ones he made when he was uncomfortable. I knew his heartbeat -– its quickening at pain. I knew his expressions –– the stitching that drew his eyebrows together when he found himself unable to articulate what was the matter. I knew his soft spots –– the ways to divert his attention and _––_

“Ye’re awfully deep in thought there, Sassenach.”

Blinking hard, I summoned a smile informed by my sprouting hope.  “Did you sleep well?”

“Och, aye. They canna help themselves ‘round here. Woke me a fair bit. Pokin’, proddin’, checkin’ my bag of piss. But aye…”

He grimaced just a little, drawing a fistful of the hospital-issue blanket into his hand. Leaning forward, I kissed his knuckles, watching his tense fingers release the bunched up blanket. His hand felt flat over his stomach. He didn’t need me to say it (“ _let the meds do the work_ ”), his thumb pressing the button on the PCA.

“Did _you_ sleep well?” he asked, eyes intent on my face.

“Actually, I did.”

The admission that I had not spent the night torn up over the situation felt wrong, like I was betraying him. The notion as quickly forgotten though as his lips turned at the corners. That slight smile of his –– the one that made me gooey at the edges –– would have been at home in a normal morning of banter. “Good. I told John to make sure ye slept and got some food in ye. Have ye eaten?”

Blinking, I shook my head. “I’m supposed to be worrying after _you_. You need to stop.”

This earned me a low chuckle.  “Ye look an awful lot better today. Still tired. A little hungry…”

“Hey,” I snorted, giving him a harmless tap on the shoulder where such a comment would have before earned a half-hearted shove. But it was true. I had seen it myself in the mirror that morning. The dark circles under my eyes still dark, but my eyelids were less swollen.  “Be nice.”

Shifting in the bed just a little, he smiled just a little wider. “I intend to be nice to ye for the rest of my days. And if the day shall come that we do part…”

His voice faded and my heart thudded expectantly. Sometimes he said things that laid me flat out and made me see stars. And I knew, _just knew_ , that this was one of those moments.

He took a breath and said, “When we do part, if my last words are not ‘I love you,’ ye’ll ken it was because I didna have time.”


	13. Part Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hand bath. An argument. A coming together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so, so much for reading along and leaving your lovely comments on the last installment. Knowing that this is resonating with so many of you means an awful lot to me. I appreciate it more than you can possibly know. <3

##  **Loss: Act II  
****Part Thirteen**

With his uninjured hand, Jamie caught me by the wrist. The look in his wide verged on pleading.  “Ye dinna need to do…  _this_.”

“I  _do_.” It took next to no effort to pull myself from his slack grasp, attempting to ignore the shiver the look on his face sent sluicing down my spine. “And I am going to.”

I double checked the door and drew the privacy curtain as I slipped out of my cardigan.  Tying my hair back, I gave him the softest smile I could muster under the circumstances.  

“Claire, ye dinna ken how this makes me feel. Like… I’m less of a man.”

“Oh Jamie.”  It came out as a long, almost-mournful breath drawn from the depths of my lungs. “Nothing could be further from the truth.  There’s nothing to be ashamed of––”

“It’s  _not_  shame.”  He turned his head, his gaze fixing on the window.  “I just dinna want ye to see me all… helpless… wretched.”

“Wretched!” The incredulity came out of me in a squawking scoff.  Inhaling deeply in an attempt to center myself before speaking again, I rounded the bed and stood directly in his line of sight. I resisted the urge to lecture him that whatever emotion he was feeling sounded  _precisely_  like misplaced shame.

“I’m weak and ye’ve no’ ever seen me like this. How am I to protect ye when I canna even  _wash_  myself?”

Almost subconsciously, I assumed the pose I typically reserved to do battle with him in an argument –– hands on hips, narrowed eyes.  His words reverberated through me ( _the hollow strike of a mallet on a bell_ ). My reaction was not borne of anger, but incredulity. And I had precisely no capacity to address it rationally. “But what about  _me_  protecting  _you_?”

He ignored me, grumbling, “Ye’ll be wipin’ my ass afore this is over. It’s… too much.”

“As if you would not be perfectly willing to care for me if our roles were reversed?” I reached for him just as he turned his head to look away. My hand ( _rebuffed and useless at providing any sort of comfort_ ) fell to my side.  

 _Pride_.  _Bloody pride_.  

I knew Jamie Fraser well enough to recognize the problem in my plan. His intractability could build an impenetrable fortress when he was pushed beyond the boundaries of his comfort zone.

“It’s different,” he grumbled, suddenly engaged in an intimate inspection of the edge of the tape holding an intricate map of tubing to the back of his hand.

“Because I’m a woman?”

“ _No_ ,” he responded sharply, the edges of the single syllable harsh. His eyes widened, suddenly bright and burning, as they found mine.

“Then why? Why is it different?”

“It just… I dinna ken. It  _is_.”

With half of a fortifying breath, I tried to back off my tone as I reached for him again.  Though he did not shy away or shrug off my touch this time, the distance between us became a gulf. “Come off it. I  _love_  you, James Fraser. Even when you’re a little broken.”

“See, I’m  _broken_. How am I supposed to be yer husband like… like  _this_? It’s my  _job_  to take care of ye, to protect ye.”

“Protect me from  _what_?” I asked, tears prickling behind my eyelids. Feelings of helplessness crested inside of me at the realization that I had no way to stave off whatever emotional response it was that he was having.  Comprehending that felt like a death. My thumb drew arcs over his cheekbones, under his eyes as he closed them.

“It’s no’ me. I’m no’ the one ye marrit.”

How _the fuck had we gotten here?_   _One simple gesture, made of goodwill, had somehow cracked the dam._

“Jamie––”

When he opened his eyes, the intensity there derailed my train of thought, leaving unsaid words spiraling in the frothy abyss of my throat. “And I’ll be  _damned_  if ye make me feel like even less of a man by doing this for me.”

Heat colored my cheeks and I dropped my hand. I was overwhelmed ( _from tiredness, exasperation, or annoyance –– I was not sure which_ ) and realized that I was about to lose my cool.

I needed him to be in the  _recovery_  stage. To quit worrying about his  _bloody leg_  for a minute.  To move on to qualitatively different pain –– the pain of physiotherapy, not the marrow-deep and seemingly interminable ache of an acute injury. To be in a state where he could safely board an airplane.

I needed to shift gears. To get home, where we could worry about where he would sleep ( _going upstairs would not be a good option for a while_ ), how he would get the bathroom while I was at work, or how we would manage the dog’s attempts to jump and love on him ( _a leash held at a distance, perhaps_ ).  To argue a little over whether he was ready to go back to work ( _he of course would overestimate his capabilities and want to go back probably a few weeks too soon_ ).

And I was trying to keep my mouth shut about all of it. The last thing Jamie needed was for me to vomit the weight of my emotions so he could bear that burden too. No. I wouldn’t; I couldn’t. I swallowed hard, unsure of what to say.

“Ye’re just tryin’ to make yerself feel better about this all.”

“And so what?” I took his chin in my hand, trying to make him look me in the eyes. “It’s a fucking  _hand bath_. You need to be  _clean_. You  _horrid_ ,  _stubborn_ , bloody  _Scot_.”

“Oh?” He jerked just a little, pulling his chin from my fingers. His eyes refocused and tapered to incisive triangles. The facial expression was a tell –– he was on the verge of being  _furious_  with me. “Tell me how ye really feel.”

“Fine.   _I will_.”  

The moment, coupled with  _his urging_ , became too much. Of their own volition, the words became unbridled from my core. Things that I had allowed to lurk in the recesses and just on the periphery of my own consciousness poured out of me.

“I am frustrated. I flew here from Scotland replaying every single stupid little thing we’ve ever said to each other, every argument where I did not let you get your way. Wondering if you were going to die, if I’d have time to atone for the things I would change.  _And then… then…_ I get here and feel utterly useless.”

My brain beseeched my mouth to fall silent or, at the very least, to adopt some understanding into my tone.  ( _Just shut the fuck up, Claire. Shut. The. Fuck. Up._ )  

I understood. I did.  I could empathize with the fact that the idea of me bathing his prone, immobile, abused body truly did bother him –– being unable to care for himself, seeing me do it for him.

But he had asked and my mouth demanded a hurried, frenzied, stammered tirade.  It was what he was going to get.

“I sat in a waiting room, Jamie, wondering if I would ever be able to go home if you died on me. If you  _leave me alone_ … I… I….”

 _That_  feeling was back. The one that had welled up inside of me in the waiting room ( _panic, near-hysteria over the prospect of losing him, the imagining of moments that would never be_ ). I kept talking only to keep myself from giving in to the demands of my nauseated guts.

“And my professional discretion has basically shriveled up and died on me from the… the…  _panic_  of all of this. I can hardly think straight.  I can’t heal you myself because I’ve gone  _stupid_. The doctors say words and I get them only academically. I want to scream at them to do better, try harder, when they’re doing  _just fine_.”

I took a breath, heart hammering and my head suddenly aching.  I searched his face for  _something_ ,  _anything_ , but his mask was up. He gave me nothing but a disgruntled Scottish noise.

“I can’t heal you,” I repeated. “I don’t have privileges. I’m  _fucking_   _terrified_  that I would do something wrong. That loving you would cloud my judgment. I’m completely  _helpless_.”

Realizing that my fingers were digging into my hips in a cruel, almost-bruising grip, I attempted to relax and flexed my trembling hands.

“And I  _realize_ that you’re in pain. You’re the one that’s hurt. It’s selfish of me to do this, but  _fuck_. Let me have a  _use_ , even if it’s making sure you don’t stink to high heaven.”

In a fading, distant kind of way, he said my name, his tone having measurably shifted. I could not tell if he was resigning himself to the realities of the situation or digging his heels in further. It was like a punch to the gut.

“Jamie, I’m… so sorry. I…” My voice grayed and disappeared as I took him in –– sitting, just watching me. Tears burned in my throat as I apologized, “That was not okay. I’m so sorry.”

After a moment, one of his eyebrows rose, a quizzical, bemused kind of look. The hint of a smile was curling the right side of his mouth. “Ye’d no’ told me ye felt sae  _strongly_  about giving me a wee bed bath, Sassenach.”

At the same time, we let out breathy, snorting laughs. If I had not laughed, I would have cried.

“For the love of  _God_ , Jamie.”  I exhaled a long, shuddering breath. It felt like I was dislodging an ancient part of me. “I don’t mean to make this about me, but just… let me  _help_. I’ve been  _scared_ … bloody  _terrified_ … and feel utterly helpless. I know you’re hurting and I shouldn’t have said all of that just now. Just let me––”

“Yes, yes. It’s fine, Sassenach” he mumbled, raising the head of his bed until he was half sitting.

I dried my sweating palms on my jeans.  “Are you sure?”  

“Aye, I’m sure.” Relenting had been an act of grace, a brokered compromise between his pride and his heart to let me take back some power. I was selfish; I would take it. “Ye did say ye’d be there in sickness and in health. I may as well let ye fulfill yer vows.”

Our wedding.   _His eyes on me as we said the words. The smell of the room.  Vows to comfort and protect, to choose each other every day. Vows to hold one another’s heart and to know one another’s soul. The blood pumping in my veins after we ran from the room to share a first kiss. The sting of the cut on my wrist that he had driven away._

“Christ, Claire. Dinna cry.” My teeth sank into the tender flesh of my cheek as I nodded. “I see it in yer face.”

After a moment, I said, “You know there’s no surer way for me to cry than you telling me not to.”

The look on his face softened as the realization of what the mention of our vows had invoked in me. “I ken.”

Perching myself on the edge of the bed, I hooked a foot around the bedside table and pulled it closer. “Ignore the tears. They’ll go away”

“I’ll do my best,” he promised.

I dipped a washcloth into one of the basins of warm water as I inspected his face, the lines traversing his forehead. They had been barely visible when we met, but had been etched just slightly deeper over our two and a half years of life together.  Two and a half years of frequent smiling, laughter, and sunshine, and rarer exasperation and frustration.  

In the desert, wind-whipped, burned, and broken, the lines had become a monument to his survival, carved in his flesh.  I ran a thumb over his unwitting souvenir before kissing the center of his forehead.

“I look like an auld man,” he grumbled, still a little tetchy despite his smile. A glass face. He  _knew_  the shapes of my every thought.

“You do  _not_  look like an  _auld man_ ,” I responded plainly, unable to mimic his accent despite years of hearing it daily and infinities of dreams effortlessly replicating it. “You look  _distinguished_.”

“Och, another word for ‘ _auld_.’”  He laid his head back. “Thanks for the vocabulary lesson. Are we goin’ to do this then?”

“Yes.” I dabbed the washcloth at his temple, swept it over his forehead, down his cheek and over his jaw before turning to the other side of his face.

“That’s yer face wash, aye?” Flushing, I rinsed the washcloth into the water and nodded.  “I can tell. It smells like blueberries and oatmeal.”

“It’s like a smoothie.” Oh God the blush in my cheeks then, riotous. It only grew as his uninjured hand rose to reposition a curl that had fallen from my bun. _Was he flirting with me? Was he soft enough, coy enough for it?_  “I like it.”

Inhaling deeply, his eyes closed. “I like it fine,  _a nighean_. It smells like  _you_  when ye come to bed all scrubbed fresh and glowin’ or kiss me goodbye in the mornin’.”

“Do you think I’ll forget our little tiff if you flirt with me?” I asked as I finished patting his face dry.

“Mmmmm. Did we have a wee disagreement?”   _He thought it was funny_.

“Mmmmm, indeed.”

“I let ye win, as I’m often inclined to do, ye see.”

A bark that came from me, half laugh and half astonishment. “Since you are in a hospital bed––”

“––pissin’ into a bag––”

“Yes, in a hospital bed and pissing into a bag, with a surgery that may or may not happen tomorrow morning, I’m going to let your mischaracterization of our life together slide.”

“Yer consideration is  _greatly_  appreciated.”

“‘You let me win,’” I parroted in my awful Scottish accent. “ _Please_.”

“Happy wife, happy life.”

Snorting, I ran the backs of my fingers along the spongy beard growing in along his jawline. I tilted my head and pressed a thumb into his lower lip. “You look quite roguish.  It’d be a good picture for the author’s information section of the book you write about this.”

“Hmph.” His teeth grazed my thumb and I resumed my roving inspection. “Take it off. I saw the shaving kit.”

“Are you sure you want  _me_  to do it?” I stilled my fingers, cupping his cheek. “Maybe John should?”

“ _Look_  at me, Claire.” He turned his face just enough to kiss my hand ( _soft, reverent, not with the sting of aching, swollen lips_ ). It was his best move, oft-repeated and never failing to warm me to the core. “A few nicks are the least of my worries.”

Swallowing hard, I nodded, taking one of the towels from a basin of water. “I’ve never done this.”

“It’s  _fine_. Ye’re an orthopedic surgeon for God’s sake, and ye shave yer legs.”

“Right.  _Legs_. Not a face.”

“Weel…” The look he gave me said that he was contemplating whether he wanted to say whatever it was that had come to him. “I’ve kent ye to shave other parts––”

“James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser. Don’t. You.  _Fucking_.  _Dare_.”

With the most self-satisfied smirk I had ever seen on his face, he settled back into the pillow.

As testily as I could manage, I took his uninjured hand, filling it with shaving cream. In reality my insiders were  _humming_  over how normal this felt. “Help me. You should be doing some occupational therapy anyway.”

Without protest, he lathered his face and throat. “Be gentle, Sassenach.”

Grunting my assent, I leaned towards him and charted the razor’s first tentative pass over his skin. I could feel his eyes roving me –– not critical, not filled with anticipation at an expected slip of my hand, not worried. Just watching me shave as I had watched him a hundred times.

“Ye’re doin’ a braw job, Claire,” he mumbled when I paused to rinse the razor. As if he read the indecision on my face, he said, “Short strokes. With the grain, then against.”

Nodding, he offered only minimal further direction before I finished.

It was a better than  _good enough_  job, but I kept to myself that I had nearly taken off one of his sideburns and had to take the other to match.

Dabbing him clean, I whispered, “You look good.” Free of the beard, I recommitted the contour of his jaw, the column of his throat, the bowed dip in the center of his lower lip to my memory. “You were still under all of the hair.”

“Just needed my bonny lass to talk me into a hand bath.” His tongue swept a line over his lips and he sighed, a soft, contented thing.

Humming a little, I untied his hospital gown and peeled it down to his lap. “Claire, wait a second…”

He inhaled sharply at the same moment my breath caught. Dark purple contusions marred his left flank the and his flesh was rash-mottled flesh from where he had slid across gravel and sand. Bruising bloomed over the center of his chest from where the paramedics and A&E staff had performed CPR in an effort to restart his heart.

“I’m fine,” I said to a question that he hadn’t asked, flicking a look up to his eyes. He was focused intently on me, drinking in my reaction.

“I ken we’ve established that it’s counterproductive to tell ye no’ to cry… it’ll just make ye cry harder.”

“Were you trying to spare me having to see this?”

“In part. Mostly I really just  _am_  that prideful.”

My cheeks burned hot beneath the tears that started to leak from my eyes. Neither of us said anything as I gently wiped his chest, his sides, his stomach. When I finished, he took the towel and dropped it to the table before taking my hand.

“We’re going to be okay,” he said, his voice surer than sure that what he said was just  _fact_.

“Remember the last surgery?” The question came from nowhere –– unplanned, unrehearsed. “You wanted to kiss me.”

Raising a single eyebrow, he shook his head just a little. “I remember wakin’ to yer face, those dark circles. The panic was radiating out of ye. The fever was almost unbearable. I dinna remember kissin’ ye.”

“Hmmm.” I shifted closer, my glance straying to his leg only long enough to make sure that I was not going to bump him. “You wanted to kiss me. I told you to––”

“Live long enough to do it properly,” he interrupted, completing the moment out loud as it returned to him.

This time I raised an eyebrow, nodding. “Memory coming back to you?”

“Aye, a little.”

“I think we can have that kiss now, the good one.”

“Ye want to kiss me?” His thumb moved over the underside of my wrist.  If I hadn’t known better ( _hadn’t seen the insides of countless bodies, manipulated muscle and organs_ ), I would have sworn that my heartbeat was rattling my bones.

His hand moved up my forearm to cup my elbow. The touch of his non-dominant hand was firm, but awkward.  Only the tip of his tongue darted out to wet his lips as I leaned forward. The clean scent of his shaving cream tingled in my nose.

“Ye want to kiss an auld man?”

“Of course I do,” I whispered, vision suddenly swimming with a third wave of tears. Vaguely, I wondered if I was doomed to get weepy every time he made me feel even the least bit sentimental. I would live with the affliction for life if it meant that he would be okay.  

With little pretense, he kissed me.  _Petroleum jelly, mint, shaving cream_. Though tender, his mouth was insistent. At the first sweep of his tongue, my entire body answered, accepting the secrets his mouth poured into me.  _Give, take, give back again, all of it._

Everything in the world but us went dark, fell still, ground to a silent halt. Without reservation, I opened to him, my hand cupping the back of his head, urging him  _closer closer closer_. He had been flayed open for me, his fingers on my face speaking every iteration of my name that he had for me. In response, I split apart and called right back ( _Jamie, my lad, love_ ).

No, we were nowhere near finished in this life. We needed more ( _centuries, millennia_ ). There was so much yet to be written. Highs and lows. Tests of our vows yet to come ––easy, difficult, conquerable.

A groan wholly inappropriate for our situation slid from me, dissolving on his tongue.  He broke the kiss, lips unsealing from mine with a smacking pop and a short laugh.  “Ye’re tangled.”

My cheeks were burning and my mouth tingled as I cast my eyes down to see where he was looking. “Fuck,” I breathed, carefully weaving my hand out of the tubing before finding the swell of his bicep.

“Finish cleaning me up?” His lips found mine again –– eyes open, chaste and short. “Ye’re helping, Claire. More than ye’ll ever ken.”

Imperfect as the ending of the kiss had been, it called to mind ten thousand times that he had made me feel like I saw us drowning in one another, completely at peace.

And it was good.


	14. Part Fourteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final surgery.

##  **Loss: Act II  
** **Part Fourteen ** _(Jamie’s Point of View)_****

Pieces of bone would be reduced to the proper alignment.

Once all of the shattered bits of my body were repositioned, implants would fuse me back together. ( _Screws to fasten plates. Rods to keep me straight.  Nails through the hollow center of bone. Rods. Wires. Etcetera._ )

Healing would become an industrial effort involving construction –– steel or titanium, cobalt or chrome joining with organic matter.

Claire and John smiled and joked before I went into the final surgery. Her smile was tight; his laugh was thin.  When Claire draped herself over me in the closest thing we could accomplish to a hug, the way she whispered “ _on your way, soldier_ ” felt like a knife twisting in my guts.

There were few moments in my life when I had been truly scared.  

When my mother died and then later Willie. Afghanistan and holding that dying boy. The first time Claire and I had taken a fight too far, the stinging finality of “ _maybe we should just break up_ ” vibrating between us, unforgettable and crafted to inflict maximum damage.  Knowing that I was dying in that desert, watching the blood seep from my wounds and with it the hope of saying  _goodbye_ or  _I am so sorry_.  

And this moment.  

Before surgery.  Watching Claire’s resolve to hold it together for me felt like steel wool at the back of my throat.  Arranging my face into the closest thing I could that resembled a smile, I said, “One more surgery and home, aye?”

Claire mumbled something that sounded vaguely like agreement.

 _Please don’t cry again.  Please don’t cry again_.

I kissed her on the side of the head, closing my eyes and inhaling the scent of whatever hotel shampoo she had used.

Everything about her had become sharper in California –– the usual soft slope of her collarbones had become a slicing line breaking over the necklines of her oversized sweaters, the edge on her words had become cutting as she spoke to physicians in the hallway where she thought I could not hear, the shards of her disregarded medical aloofness.

And her hair.  She was freshly scrubbed, but the curls beneath my lips were coarser than they were under my fingertips at home.  _My Claire_ had shifted slightly, like I was looking at her through glasses with the wrong prescription.

_Claire in a different place, a different time –– a memory that hardly felt real._

I turned my face away from this stranger ( _my wife_ )and looked at John, breathing through my mouth.  

_John. Familiar, steady John untouched by all of this save the dark circles under his eyes and his fingernails, chewed down to the quick._

“You promised,” I mouthed to him as Claire rose from our makeshift hug, turning her back to me as she wiped tears ( _fucking tears that I had become an expert at causing_ ) with the sleeve of her jumper.  

Nodding, John uncrossed his legs, clasped his hands, and lowered his head.

“I want ye back,” I mumbled, licking my lips and studying the curve of her neck.  She took one final swipe of her cheeks with her sweater as she turned to me.  I needed to commit everything about her to memory, even though I never wanted to recall this moment.  

_Those broken honey eyes.  Those salty cheeks.  That unfamiliar scent.  Those rough curls._ _That helplessness that was growing inside of her like a cancer the nearer we got to the surgery, dulling her and drawing her further and further inside of a shell._

“What?  I’m not gone… What are you…?”

My mind supplied the answer when my lips refused to move: ‘ _Making a memory_.  _One I do not want_.’

Her brows were furrowed, the cupid’s bow of her upper lip swollen from where her teeth had been worrying it.  

_Hey.  I love love love you._

And I would wake after the surgery,  _not remembering_.

The haze of anesthesia had stolen the rest. ( _The promises of outcomes she knew she could never predict.  The kiss that likely tasted like stale vending machine coffee and unripened hope.  The way she likely bade me ‘goodbye-for-now, not-goodbye-forever.’ The walk to the operating theatre with some small talk about what a beautiful wife I had and whether we would start a family.  The souring of my stomach as I realized that this entire thing had probably pushed that particular dream out to some unknowable date.  The counting backwards as I went under, closer to more fog than the dream that had lived in technicolor in my mind since she dropped that packet of birth control into the wastepaper bin._ )

I woke, knowing it was over.  

 _The pain had changed, telling me it was_ done told me as much. I had been put back together.

Claire sat next to the hospital bed, her arms crossed over her stomach and fingers gripping her sides.

Her mouth was moving, but I could not make out what she was saying.

_Was she praying?_

I looked up at the ceiling, counting tiles.

_One.  Two. Three._

“ _Jamie_?” Her voice was wispy, so unsure and not enough to keep me lucid.

Blinking, I thought no more _._

_Sleep._

_It was like her body was speaking to me –– pale curves on dark sheets, hair curling around her shoulders, thighs trembling as she slowly let them fall apart. The fingers of her left hand curled into bedding as she reached for me with her right._

_“Love me,” she whispered, back arching just as my tongue darted out to wet my lips without conscious thought._

_My wife.  The woman who had a preternatural pull over me._

_A need so deep, so primitive, that compliance with those two simple words became instinct._

_I took her fingers as I crawled over her, pressing her hand deep into the mattress. Drawing herself up, she breathed into my mouth at the same time that she said, “You’re going to get **better** for me.”_

_Was something wrong?_

_“This isn’t just our lives anymore.”_

_She laughed when I started:  “Are ye preg––”_

_My mouth was gone.  She kissed a blank expanse of flesh, head bobbing in a nod or shaking ‘no.’  I could not tell._

_Blink._

_Awake_.

Her hair was wound around her hand and she was leaning forward with tears in her eyes.

_God could you please knock the fucking crying off for a few hours?_

I wanted to beg for something else, hating the fact that I was seeing her like this again.  

“Jamie?” Her voice was a delicate shell of a thing, curling around my name.  “You’re in the recovery room.  How are you feeling?”

An inquisition.  

She was close enough that I could smell that god awful hotel shampoo.   _God awful only because it was not hers_. I let the foreignness of it knock around in my brain and unsettle my stomach.

_I can’t, my love. I am sorry._

_Blink._

_Sleep_.

_Pain ripped through my thigh.  White agony seized the fingers of my right hand as I lost my hold on her wrist.  I rolled onto my back and she rose over me, mascara running in streams down her cheeks._

_“Our family. Someday, but not now. This whole thing… let’s push pause.”_

_Her weight on my thigh, the blister pack of pills that she popped into her palm like a religion.  Dispensing them into her system at intervals set by the alerts on her mobile phone._

_“You are so broken.  Let’s concentrate on **us** again for a while.”_

_Her weight was slight on my thighs, but oh Christ the pressure._

_It hurt._

_Oh God. The pain –– a cautery that had nothing to do with my surgery and the crushing of the back of my head._

_Enough sleep.  Awake again, for real._

I woke with a gasping start, wheezing.  

My eyes were burning.

I couldn’t hear.

My face was wet.

A grinding ache rushed up my thigh, and my mouth flooded with saliva as my wame threatened to revolt.  Errant spit dribbled over my chin and I cinched my eyes shut, trying to stop the groundswell of nausea.

Her name grew in my mind.  

Each letter took shape, heavy on my tongue.  

I needed to say it, but I couldn’t.

 _Claire_.

A cool washcloth dabbed at my chin and familiar fingers curled around my upper arm.

Those fingers had touched me in countless ways.  In comfort ( _my father’s funeral, curled up in a ball after any number of nightmares about war or decay or death, when I was wretchedly sick with a cold on our couch_ ).  In love ( _anniversaries where we fed one another, our wedding as we danced with her fingers in my hair, the moment we decided to try for a baby_ ).  In lust ( _a hundred nights where we drew sounds out of one another_ ).  In absent-minded moments ( _a car ride, as she searched for the answer in crossword, or when she gave into her habit of curling her fingers into the hairs at the back of my neck as we bushed our teeth side by side_ ).

_I was going to be sick._

“Dinna do that,” I mumbled, trying to bat her hand away.  It was heavy, bandaged.

She took me by the forearm, guiding my hand back down and arranging it on top of a pillow. “You’re in a post-surgical recovery room.”

_I was going to vomit on my wife._

“I’m going to raise the bed up a little… it might help.”  She pressed the button on the rail of the bed and I closed my eyes.  It was like being on a rollercoaster.  “Try to be still, love.”

Her quality of her voice was somewhere between the one she used when I woke in the night as she slipped into bed ( _warming her autumn chilled toes and fingers and nose on me_ ) and what I knew to be her Dr. Beauchamp-Fraser tone ( _the one she used to talk to residents on the phone in the middle of the night_ ).  

She was leaning too close and I raised my hand in an attempt to push her away, the burning in my chest becoming almost unbearable.  Again, she took my forearm.

“That’s your hand that’s injured.”  She set my hand back down onto the pillow.  I could have killed her.  She was preventing me from pulling far enough back that she would be spared the splash back of my vomit.  

“I’m going to…”

The same finely-boned fingers that I had held down to the mattress in an opaque haze raked my hair back and curved along my scalp.  She was holding a small tray –– pink plastic, shaped like a kidney.  “It’s okay. Just get it out.”

“I dinna need permission to  _vomit_.”  The words came out sharper than I intended, but my primary concern was whether I was going to throw up on her.  My secondary concern was if I still had two legs.  I took the tray from her and rested it on my chest.  “Is it done?”

“It’s done,” she confirmed. Her fingers were growing into my skull, becoming a part of me through her touch. “You’re put back together.”

“And they’re both…”  I swallowed, glancing down.  Without glasses and in the pall of painkillers, everything south of the bundle of blankets at my waist was a blur.  Her eyes were fixed on the same spot, focused and thoughtful.

“They’re both there.  No one took your leg.  You’ll be back to normal with some time and some physical therapy.”  

I looked at her ( _really looked at her_ ) for the first time since I had woken a few moments earlier.   _This beautiful woman. The one who pledged an entire lifetime to be with me, who would be with me hopefully even longer. She was brought to me for a million reasons, including to be with me in these moments.  To bring me back to life again and again._

Her voice caught on the end as she said, “A few weeks is all.  We’ll get to go home.”

_The one who stayed calm as my mind spun and I tried to force her away.  The patience of a saint._

“Claire…” It was as if I had never before said her name.

 _That moment in the distillery when we first met.  The banter.  The fucking curl.  It led to this.  Commitment. Sacrifice.  An aching empathy that had volume._   

“I love ye.”

“ _I know._ ”

“I am tired.”  

“Then sleep, Jamie.”  

She was whispering or I was fading.  

 _She loved me, too_.

_Blink._

Her lips on my forehead.  The blurring of reality and dream –– the scent on her hair was back to normal as she kissed me on the cheek.

“Sleep, my love.”  

_Okay._

I was working the first time I met Claire Beauchamp.  

She was wrangling a throng of drunk women and looked a little harassed by the ordeal.  She came to the counter blowing a chunk of hair off of her face.  I stared for what felt like ( _and probably was_ ) an extraordinarily long moment before speaking.  “Claire Beauchamp?” I looked at my clipboard of reservations and passed her the invoice to sign.  

“Yes to Claire.  No to  _Beauchamp_.  _Beecham_.” Her mouth coiled around the retort as if we were familiar with one another.

“Why the Anglicization?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at her.  She raised one well-groomed eyebrow and my mouth twisted with the barest hint of a smile.

“To spite the French?”

_Oh, some fire, this one._

“Or perhaps,  _sir_ , you should consider that the modern French pronunciation was never the pronunciation of my English family name.   _Perhaps_ it derived from the Norman French and was never pronounced as you or I pronounce it now.”

“ _Sassenachs_ ,” I snorted, taking the pen from her.  She responded with a snort of her own ( _a wee, cute thing_ ) and a clueless look on her face ( _eyes too wide to show disdain, mouth too set to show vulnerability_ ).  

Apparently she had never had the pleasure of being called out on her Englishness.  

“I assume ye all are prepared to taste some whisky?” I asked, fighting the urge to tuck the curl that kept falling over her brows behind her ear.  

“Fair assumption.  I’m teetotal, though.”  

“Hmmmm.”

This time she batted the curl ( _that fucking curl_ ) off of her forehead with the back of her hand.  My fingers tapped a rambling rhythm against my thigh, willing my heart to slip out of my throat and back into my chest.

“I’m the driver,” she supplied, tossing a look over her shoulder.  “It’s my friend’s birthday.  I’m sober tonight.  Tomorrow, though…” Her voice trailed and she shook her head a little.  

( _The curl again –– clouding my mind, diluting every professional boundary I had until they shimmered like an oasis.  For the love of God_.)

“I thought a teetotaler was someone who abstains from alcohol generally, no’ just to be a designated driver.”

At this, her brows knit together and her cheeks flushed a brilliant pink. “Are you quite finished with your vocabulary lesson?”

“Oh, _quite_.” Behind closed lips, I ran my tongue over my teeth.   _Quite_.

 _Awake again_.

A different room.  

The same hospital –– far from home.

Claire was hissing, but her voice was quiet and low.

I blinked.  

The room was dark.  My eyes refused to focus, to draw into relief the details of my surroundings.

 _Andrew Wilson_.   _The partner at my firm who had been hiking with me._

My heart skipped as Claire leaned towards him, her index finger burrowing into his chest just above his heart.  “Who  _the fuck_ doesn’t check on a colleague who is  _hiking_ and  _alone_?”

Still groggy from surgery and with not even the narrowest appreciation for any of my physical limitations, I reached for the bed railing in an attempt to pull myself into a sitting position.

“Claire, I… I…”  

Andrew was searching for something,  _anything_ to say to quell Claire’s wrath.  I knew there likely was nothing for him to say at the moment that would help the situation.  If I had my wits about me, I would have told him not to bother, that her rage on this subject was likely self-propagating and endless.

“Don’t say  _a bloody thing_.” Claire’s finger burrowed its way further into Andrew’s chest. “Just…  _fuck you_.”

Inhaling, she squared her shoulders and shook her head just a little, glancing between her finger and Andrew’s face.  The disquieting calm that washed over my wife made her intentional and sharp.

When she spoke again, her tone was measured, softer.  Infinitely more lethal.  She began slowly, the change perhaps readily apparent to me but not to Andrew.  This was how she hunted prey –– incisive, cool, sounding detached though she was anything but.  

“I don’t blame you for Jamie getting hurt, Andrew. He is too stubborn to be told  _anything_. Like how it’s a bad idea to go hiking alone. His injuries would have been  _bad_ either way, but you  _left him_.”

The pause sucked the air out of the room, the breath from my lungs, the color from Andrew’s face.

“And he almost died out there.  My husband.  He was bleeding, broken,  _alone_. The sun, the heat.  You know that his heart stopped in that ambulance, right?”

Andrew was an inch shorter than me, which meant he absolutely towered over my wife.  But in that moment, she was a giant.  A giant who was probably about to say something that would jeopardize my career.

“I never intended for him… I mean… Claire, ye must understand––”

“And here you are with your bullshit gas station flowers and your sympathy in the suit his work has bought you…”  Disdain painted her words now –– red and shades of grey.  “He is  _everything_ to me.  Do you get that?”

I swallowed and tried to say something ( _anything_ ), to tell her that it was  _okay_ , but my tongue was gummy in my mouth and my throat was too dry.  

I _knew_ her.  I  _knew_ that if the words keep unfurling themselves from her gut, not her head, she would likely say something that would jeopardize my career.

She rose to her toes, that bloody curl falling across her forehead ( _the one that seemed to fall when she was in some kind of mood_ ).  She furiously swiped it away, sticking her finger back into his chest ( _hard enough that he took half of a step back_ ).  

“How in the hell did it take you until  _Monday_ to realize he was gone, Andrew?”

Andrew had both of his hands behind his head, leaning away from the fury radiating out of her.  “Claire… please… I texted him, called him.  I just figured he was sleeping off a hangover in his hotel room.”

“I’ll _fucking bet_ ,” she muttered, taking the finger out of his chest and crossing her slim arms over her stomach.

 _Andrew did not get me into that mess.  I got me into that mess.  Fate got me into that mess._ However, seeing her rage was better than watching her cry, but only by the slimmest of margins.

“He was going to apologize to  _you_.  Ye ken that, right?  He went off on his own, sayin’ he had to make amends with ye.  That ye were in a right  _mood_.”

_Nothing good was going to come of this conversation._

Whatever sentiment I had wanted to use to interrupt their escalating argument came out as nothing more than a gurgling murmur.  

Claire turned, the fire in her eyes quickly fading from a full-scale conflagration to a smolder.  The look lingered for a moment.  It melted to a warm puddle of whisky by the time she made her way across the room.  She glanced quickly on the monitors that had been keeping a constant vigil of  _beep click whoosh_ before looking at me.  “Are you in pain?  Uncomfortable?  I’m sorry… we were getting…  _heated_.”

At her understatement, I somehow managed to dislodge my tongue from the roof of my mouth.  “ _Water_.”

She reached for the plastic jug on my bedside table and maneuvered the straw to my lips.  I could feel Andrew’s eyes on me.  The  _pity_ there made my stomach clench.  Claire could see me like this.  I could not take  _Andrew fucking Wilson_ –– the man who decided my raises, reviewed my work, decided if I would be making partner –– seeing me like this.  After emptying the jug, I intended to give her the best thing I could assemble that looked like a smile, to tell her to take a walk or grab dinner while I straightened things out with Andrew.

But it never came.  My eyes drew closed at the press of soft lips on my forehead.  

I did not wake until morning –– sunlight glowing amber over the rumpled mess of my wife, twisted into a ball on a chair next to the bed with John’s jacket over her shoulders.  She looked serene, that single curl resting along the center of her forehead.


	15. Part Fifteen

##  **Loss: Act II  
** **Part Fifteen**

Jamie was released from the hospital on the afternoon of my fifteenth day in California.

Some of those days passed in an instant.  

( _Arriving to the hospital in darkness. White light soaking in through an anonymous window, staring at interminable desert as Jamie went for this appointment or that. Collapsing face-down on a hotel bed without eating, the TV bathing me in technicolor_.)

Some days seemed like a very long time indeed.

( _Tears. Hissed Gaelic curses to transform expressions of pain into another language. As if I could not read his face, his limbs, the very march of his inhalations, or read the very core of him. Sitting and waiting.  No answers or answers that did little to soothe my mind_.   _Doctor after doctor, nurse after nurse._ )

We had three weeks remaining in California.  

Twenty-one unknowable days to live ( _survive_ ) before Jamie could board an airplane.  

A few days earlier, I soundly defeated Jamie in a disagreement over the idea that we would immediately return home.  Hackles up, we traded barbs about one another’s respective personality traits ( _his stubbornness, my unreasonableness_ ) that became easy fodder for avoiding the  _real_ problem ( _our joint desire to go home_ ). I agreed with his surgeon’s directive to wait, but standing my ground stung.  

Five hundred and four hours before we could claw our way back  _home_.  

The contrast between his demeanor as we prepared to leave the hospital and the night before was striking.  

As we stuffed his belongings into three plastic bags, Jamie had been hopeful, laughing, tactile,  _open_. He waxed poetic about sleeping in a real bed with his own pajama pants. I leaned forward to rest my elbows on the mattress, scrolling through pictures of the house where we would be staying.  He mapped a trail across the breadth of my shoulders with hands that spanned from the ridge of one scapula to the next,  _attentive_.  When my cheeks hollowed in a series of yawns and my eyes fell to half-mast, he urged me to go to the hotel ( _tenderness replacing his usual smolder absent when he remarked that it would be the last night I would sleep alone_ ).

But once discharged, Jamie was somehow at once broad and smaller,  _narrower_.  Muscle, skin, organs, joy –– all had been drawn close to the bone.   He was quiet, distant. When John ( _a god send who had left Scotland, spent a week with me, returned home, and then come back to_ California) helped him into the backseat, Jamie snapped that he was not a child. Abruptness in his tone ground the words down into nothing more than salt.

 _He did not need anyone’s sympathy_.   _Jaw poised and prepared to transform into stone.  Teeth gritted.  Eyes on fire._

Though closed, a flicker of my husband was visible beneath the mask. His lips composed themselves ( _slightly parted, hesitant_ ). However, before Jamie could apologize, John shook his head.  “Don’t you dare say it.”  

Jamie just stared, face softening and rapidly blinking.  

 _The lights were on, but the doors were still closed_.

“You won’t drive me away, mate.” The space between them was an electric current, curving and whipping back into place.  John raised an eyebrow, pulling the seatbelt over Jamie’s chest and buckling it wordlessly before rounding to the driver’s seat.  While California had done its damnedest to put my marriage through the wringer ( _fear, uncertainty, pain_ ), my husband’s friendship with his closest friend was being tested in equal measure.  

In the backseat, I curled my hand around the back of Jamie’s neck, tracing small, meaningless patterns along his hairline.  With his head tilted back and resting on the seat, I was able to  _really_ inspect my husband in the light of day for the first time in weeks.  Although his sunburn had faded, he was pale beneath his tan.  Dark circles cast purple, beaten stains beneath his eyes.  His cheeks were hollowed in a way that sunlight pronounced.  His weight had dropped a fair bit, but it was plain in the pits of negative space along his shoulders and the way his t-shirt draped at his waist.  While the abrasions on his face had healed quite well and the cuts started to close ( _some still garish and others only a whisper of pink_ ), he looked like he had been bruised on the inside.

I wanted to forget that California existed, never to return.  I laid my head back, just staring as he dozed, itching to survey each inch of him now that he was no longer hospitalized.

_Twenty-one days.  I could do anything for twenty-one days._

We pulled into the front drive of a small desert rental bungalow.  

_“Honeymoon?” the owner had asked as he passed John the keys. The keychain had a garish plastic ‘I LOVE PALM SPRINGS’ bauble dangling from it.  I stood in the entryway, arms crossed over my chest in a way that should have telegraphed something diametrically opposed to a **honeymoon**. John had simply raised an eyebrow, muttering, “Something like that.”  _

At John’s telling of the story, Jamie had provided only an unenthused, unimpressed “hmmm.”

This time, Jamie allowed John to help him out of the car with little more than a muttered ‘ _thank you_.’

As I pushed Jamie’s wheelchair across the threshold, John sang, “ _Home sweet home_.”

_Twenty-one days._

_Home sweet home._

The overcast dreariness of an Edinburgh sky.  Autumn in its last dance, winter anticipating its entrance at stage right.  A chill to pink my cheeks and numb the tip of my nose.  My brand of milk.  The brown, speckled eggs that Jamie purchased at the mini market direct from the owner’s countryside coops.  To be bored on the couch with my husband, a little restless and irritated at how loud he had the television to watch rugby.

_Home sweet home._

No.

The bungalow was a vast improvement over the hospital’s sterility.

Yet,  _no_.

The Scottish noise that rose from the wheelchair made plain that my husband’s annoyance with the entire situation had peaked. I just rolled my eyes, drawing the door closed with one foot.  His voice could not have been any blander when he mumbled, “Aye.  It’s _great_ , John.”

“What’s the plan?” I asked, rounding the front of the wheelchair, trying to ignore his tone.  Jamie’s hands were in his lap, fingers picking absently at a nonexistent hangnail.    _Silence_. “A shower will feel good, right?”

I ran a finger over his jaw and immediately regretted the gesture as he turned his head, fixing a glare at nothing in particular.  His voice was steel wool as he mumbled “ _fine_.”

Without more than a glance, John escaped to the kitchen. I carefully maneuvered the wheelchair down the hall and into the bathroom.  With the wheels locked, we were both silent as I helped him out of his t-shirt.  

“Ye’re no’ goin’ to pick me up––” Jamie protested as I bent, slipping my hands to his sides to help him to his feet.

“I’m stronger than I look.”

He rolled his eyes, not shrinking away though I had expected him to fuss.  “As if I dinna ken that.”

“On your feet, soldier.  Literally.” With a bumbling, somewhat awkward ascent, he was up onto one foot, arm around my waist and my face pressed into his chest. The  _mass_ of him was comforting.  It was the first time that he had not seemed  _small_ in nearly a month.  

I exhaled a long, shaking breath, allowing my eyes to close.

 _Ribs. I could feel them. Not in their usual, gentle bump beneath the skin kind of way.  They were pronounced.  Aching for a return to normalcy_.

“Claire… if ye cry… ye’ll need to go.  I’m serious.”

“I won’t cry,” I lied, lips absorbing the thrum of his beating heart. “ _Or_ go.”

I looked up to catch something warring in his eyes –– a far off storm of no discernible origin.  “It hurts like hell today, Sorcha.  I’m sorry if I’ve been short wi’ ye.”

“I’m not surprised that you’re hurting,” I sighed, pressing my cheek over his sternum.  “Let’s get you showered, fed, medicated, and put to bed.”

“I dinna want to be babied.”

Pulling back, I helped lift his t-shirt over his head and removed his shorts.  “This is not babying.  You fell off a cliff, if you don’t recall.”

“Ye dinna think ye’re bein’ a wee bit dramatic?”

Brow furrowed, I denied the allegation, shaking my head. He held up his injured hand and I set about removing the tape covering the incision. The narrow incision webbed across his finger, over his knuckle, ridged and pink.  A ghost he would bear likely for life.  After a brief inspection, I declared that it looked like it was healing well and carefully lowered his hand to his side.

Reaching behind me, I turned on the shower.  

“Ye’re next, aye?”

I responded with some sort of dumb intonation like “ _huh?_ ”

“Yer clothes.  Fair’s fair.” He tested the water with his good hand, shaking droplets from it and splattering the front of my shirt.  “If ye’re goin’ to baby me, ye need to join me in the shower.”

We had been finding the cracks in our union, smearing glue over them with our fingertips, and rebuilding.  The pieces of the man I loved had been disassembled and put back together in a way that was slightly amiss.  I touched his broad wrist, fingers tracing the meandering blue lines of his veins before slipping free of my t-shirt and shorts, bra and panties.

“I’ve missed ye, Claire.  Just bein’ wi’ ye.  No’… this…” His eyes cast down my body, a quick appraisal.  “I mean, it’s great, but… just moments, ye ken?”

“I know,” I sighed, stepping back until we were under the spray of water.  I held his upper arms as he leaned back to sit on the shower seat.  We were careful with one another –– touches not straying from anything other than scrubbing clean, for once, the smell of hospital off of one another’s bodies.  “You did this for me once.  That day… the first time I lost a patient.”

My fingers tangled in the water-heavy curls at the back of his head.  “Aye.”

“It felt like my world was ending.  You made everything stand still.”

My fingers strayed to his shoulders –– scars over bone, muscle trembling.

More for my benefit than for his, I tightened my grasp on him.  “We will rebuild, Jamie.”

His lips just above my navel, forehead pressed beneath my breasts and hands on my hips, he mumbled, “Twenty-one days.”

Hours later, on the cusp of waking, I vaguely registered the sensation of lips on my knuckles and fingertips on my face, tracing my cheekbones and lips.  The path his lips took was familiar and practiced, having been well traveled over the years.

I turned instinctively towards ( _into_ ) Jamie’s touch.

_Just a minute longer.  The dream was too good to end like this, so early._

My brain wanted to ask if he was okay, but the exhaustion of the previous day weighted down my limbs and tongue.  

_The rustle of a nightgown, the fabric ghosting over planes of skin.  The careful press of fingertips into the fleshiest part of my right thigh, a whispered appraisal of “bòidheach.” The almost ancient rush of muscle memory responding to his touch as he slid his palm along the curve of my leg, up the curve of one buttock and then skated from the butterfly curve of one hip to the other._

“Don’t stop,” I mumbled sleepily, balling the bedsheets up in my fist.

“Wasna planning on it,” he said evenly, voice clear and sure.

My eyes fluttered open.  “It’s not a dream? I––”

“It’s not,” he confirmed, smiling.  The vague, sarcastically quizzical lift to his voice at the end of a breathed “ _enjoying yerself_?” indicated he did not really expect a response.

_Oh God. The smile.  His touch (it had seemed practiced the first time we were intimate, but now felt as though his knowledge of my body was innate, elemental)._

His general ploy for late-night touches to rouse me usually involved some combination of his right hand holding me still or fondling, kneading, or caressing.  But that first night in the rental house, at some unnamable, ungodly hour well after midnight, though, his approach changed.  His bandaged left hand was suspended over my head on the pillow and his right cupped as the curve of searching lips found skin.

His name was the only word I could find.  It tumbled out,  _again and again_.  His teeth grated down the same place where his kiss had warmed my shoulder.  A shiver ran down my spine and settled in the pit of my stomach.

“Give me yer mouth, Sassenach.”  

I had fallen so far that seeking heat was reflex and did not respond. I swiveled my head, careful not to jostle his hand, offering myself.  He leaned forward and gathered my submission into his mouth –– ravenous and searching, demanding and taking everything.  Thumb curved along the half-moon of his ear, I whimpered into his mouth as my eyes closed again.  

Only then did he slow his approach, teasing.

Just hands, breath, and tenderness remained.

It’s funny the things you notice while reconnecting with someone.  

The invisible dusting of fine hairs along the shell of his ear like the most tender of apricots beneath my index finger.  The low noise that vibrated in a chest, unable to be heard by even the keenest of ears and unknowable except through touch, but still loud and consuming.  The way a body gone dormant awakens ( _ignites_ ) in a series of cascading sensations –– all familiar but somehow forgotten as each switch is flipped into the on position.

The fear that lingered despite his admonition in the hospital that we not waste our time with it was gone.  

The slight anxiety building in my gut about the monetary limits of his traveler’s health insurance policy faded to nothing.  

The hum of air conditioning was drowned out by the anticipation of my own beating heart.

_His thumb, broad and sure, stroking in an arc just under my navel._

“Touch me,” I mumbled, goosebumps traveling in a wave up along my forearms.

Apparently not needing any more encouragement, his hand made a home between lace and forgotten flesh.

Sounds rolled from me.

_Throat. Chest.  Belly._

Guttural and mewling.  Breathy cries and profane declarations, admonitions.  

His thumb cresting, doubling down.  A figure eight and the soft hum of his appreciation as I begged.

 _It wasn’t enough_.

The feeling of his hands against me ( _spreading, testing_ ) bent me to, my lips searching.  

He pulled back, a smile teasing my need.  

The panic of the last week had snuffed out the conscious recognition of my physical need for him.  _Need_ had dwelled only in dreams, flashes of memories of our bodies joining.

And for the first time since John called me over a week earlier, my bartering with fate for Jamie to be okay had reached its end.  In its absence, my body craved him –– a drug to swirl the landscape of my brain, to find the centerline of me and unzip.  

My body demanded it ( _for him to expose my every nerve, make it come alive_ ).  

In the moment, I would have given him absolutely anything ( _everything_ ) to have the need fulfilled.

_But he already had it all._

White light burned in the space between my ribs, the shell of my stomach, the swell of my breasts, the space between my legs. I wanted to beg for him ( _harder, faster, more_ ). His fingers ( _delicate, teasing_ ) were delicious, but I yearned for the pressure of him on top of me, to hold his shoulders or his lower back as he settled between my legs and found his way home.

“I want you inside me.”The admission fell from the litany of sharp cries and gasped little “ _oh oh oh_ ”s that tumbled from my lips.

“No.  No,  _mo nighean donn_.” He rose up, just enough to hover over me slightly, a grimace pinching his brow as he adjusted his leg. His left hand curved itself as best as it could around the crown of my head, fingers sinking into curls. “I want to watch ye.”  

And he did, smiling as I clung to the neckline of his t-shirt, trying to hold onto him and to focus on the moment.

 _Gravity was failing. I would disappear_.

I adjusted and dragged my fingernails along his untrimmed hairline, anchoring myself to his pulse. My thumb was determined to live there, measuring the work of his still-beating heart and attempting to ward off the orgasm building in my belly with science.  

My feet tightened into hard, curving arches that paddled hopelessly for purchase against the sheets. It was too soon, but I needed the completion of it like I needed air.  

‘ _Too soon, too soon_ ,’ my mind chanted, needing his reconnection to me to last forever. With an understated tenderness, he had drawn us back together.

Jamie was dressing wounds I did not know I had.

He kissed me again, his tongue pressing flat and lazy against mine.  Between my legs, his fingers became decisive, finding purpose.  I sank my teeth into his lower lip as he stroked up, curving his fingers  _just right_.  The pad of his thumb worked against me in a way that made me wanton ––  _arching, bursting, flooding, moaning._

From the sharp hiss that escaped his lips, I knew my fingernails were sinking a bit too deep along his hairline and at his throat.  My mumbled “ _sorry_ ” was met with by Jamie’s shaking head and a laugh ( _genuine, eyes creasing, crystal clear for the first time since I had arrived in California_ ). I could feel his smile on my lips and in my belly, but could not see through closed eyes.  His words were firm, but breathy as he replied, “Dinna apologize, mo ghràidh.”  

 _Lips on cheeks, fingers insistent now. Working to compel my undoing_.  

The feeling that gripped my insides was so much better than I remembered.  I arched into his hand, grinding as my thoughts begin to blur one into the next. I wanted to beg for him, to tell him how much I needed and loved him. But my tongue stopped the words from coming.

“Claire… look at me.”  With no small amount of effort, I complied by cracking an eye.  He was smiling and licked his lips. “Tell me how it feels.”

I meant to speak, but only gasps escaped.  Nothing about his responsive smile made me blush, but heat rose in my cheeks nonetheless.  Some husky, overwrought assemblage of “ _so good_ ,” “ _missed you_ ,” and “ _don’t stop_ ” fell from me.

The thumb of his injured hand swept across my forehead in an arc, back and forth. The tenderness made my body lock up, curve, and tighten. “I ken ye’re close, Claire. Give in.”

It wasn’t that I had needed his permission, but his words unfolded a release that throbbed deep inside of me.  

_Pulsing, burning, exploding, and melting._

All at once, new and ripening, blinding me and exposing a thousand universes to my eyes. Beginning and ending me.

It was almost as if I could feel  _everything_.  Not just the stilling of his fingers inside of me and the final sweeping encouragement of his thumb, but the explosive dilation of my pupils, the syrupy warm rush of blood from one chamber of my heart to the next, the engorgement of the vessels that made my skin flush absolutely everywhere.  

I went limp, head lazily drifting to the side. Jamie slipped his hand from between my legs, and wiped it on the sheets ( _a move I had chastised him for before_ ) and rested his palm just above my heart.  I looked at him through bleary eyes, the punch-drunk blush staining my cheeks and neck furiously hot.

“Ye ken that yer undoing at my hands is the most beautiful thing I could imagine, right?” he asked, tracing the thin chain of my necklace before leaning forward into the slightest kiss. Tension melted out of his shoulders and I rested my hand over his. Apparently embracing understatement, he sighed into my throat: “ _Good. Good. Good_.”

After a time, I shifted to face him directly.  Knowing I was flushed and undone with my nightgown bunched beneath my breasts, I was prepared to return the favor.  I reached between us, my hand slipping into the front of his shorts.  

“Claire, I––” he started as my fingers ventured into the bristly hair of his lower belly and began a lazy downward descent.

Leaning to kiss him, a sting cut through the haze of the still-pulsating heartbeat of my pleasure when he pulled back.

“I’m no’––”

It was too late for the words to land.  My palm rested against the warm, mostly soft length of him.

_Oh._

“I dinna ken if I can… I’m sorry, I just… I canna…”

Going still, I leaned forward again and managed to catch his lower lip between mine.  He pulled back before the kiss could deepen and I slipped my fingers free of his waistband. His sigh was ragged, detached. The glow that had lit him from within at making me come was rapidly fading.

With eyes cast down, he looked at his hand that was resting on my belly when he repeated, “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about, James Fraser.” Taking his chin, I maneuvered our faces until we were looking at one another. “I’m here whenever you’re ready.”

With a soft snort, he maneuvered my nightgown back down to rest rather respectably over my thighs.  “Ready for me in yer granny nightie?”

Humming, I gave him the lightest peck on the tip of his nose, the bow of his lips. “I can wear  _whatever_ you want, my lad.  You can have me  _however_ you want.  Whenever you are ready and you want to.  Consider it an open invitation.”

“ _However_ I want?  Ye’re sayin’ ye’ll let me put it––”

“I swear to god, James Fraser…”

My eyes darted around his face.  A warmth smoldered in my belly that hadn’t been there since the night of the gala.  Before we argued.  

 _Joy_.

I was weightless

“I love you, but if you finish that sentence I’ll break your other leg.”  

This earned a laugh as he returned my kiss.  “Are ye at all tired?”

Licking my lips, I did not want to admit that I was about to fall asleep –– the warm, honeyed feeling of my orgasm full in my belly and making my eyelids heavy. His eyes were bright, awake.  I shook my head in a white lie, supplying, “Netflix?”

“I thought ye said that having a television on in the bedroom was no’ good for…” He paused, as if searching for the word, before putting on the poshest English accent imaginable and saying, “ _Sleep hygiene_.”  

“Why do you say it like I made it up?” I pouted just a little, feigning exasperation.  “First, it isn’t good for staying on a schedule or getting restful sleep. Second, I  _guarantee_ that I don’t sound like  _that_.”

“Ye do, though. Sound like that. Ye sound downright plummy.”

My laugh was slow and sleepy as I adjusted, turning myself a little sideways so I could rest my head on his chest without disturbing the careful assemblage of his legs. “But this isn’t  _our bedroom_ , so we can make an exception.”

I carefully avoided explaining that since arriving in California I had slept ( _and not slept_ )with the television on every night.  It had become somewhat of a comfort.

With a kiss on the top of my head, he said, “I suppose we already chilled.”

“A Netflix and chill joke?  You’re losing your touch, Fraser.”  I shook my head, closing my eyes as he switched on the television.  

_Losing his touch._

It was the opposite of what I had meant.  

The moment.  The intimacy. The laughter.  The crease at the corner of his eyes as he smiled.  The way he had touched me.  The pride in his eyes and voice, the swell of his chest as he had finished me.  The teasing. The love that radiated from him through it all.

No.  Jamie wasn’t losing his touch. He was getting it back.

Glancing at the clock, I saw that it was nearly one in the morning.

_Twenty days._


	16. Part Sixteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The 21-day routine.

##  **Loss (Act II)  
** **Part Sixteen _(Jamie’s Point of View)_**

Claire had the most beautiful hands.  

They carried with them stories.  

Stories of battle, survival, love, and passion.  

They were learned hands –– capable of so much.

Her fingers were long and thin, nimble.  

The spaces between them were meant for my own fingers, to take up the void.  To fill the space, to learn those stories and carry some with me ( _for her, in her stead_ ).  

Her fingers saved lives, gave comfort to patients, and signed the name we shared ( _the one that she made her own_ ).  

She was sure with those fingers.

Agile and steady.  

In the early days of our relationship, I knew from those hands that she loved me.  Well before she said that she loved me or entertained the notion that our story could last forever ( _and ever_ ), her fingers spoke all of her unsaid things.  She had allowed them to rove freely over every part of my body ( _and etcetera_ ) in the early days of our relationship.  

“ _Ye canna believe what Claire Beauchamp can do with a scalpel.  Yer wife has a golden set of hands, James_ ,” a colleague of hers once said as I replenished her wine glass at a work party.  ( _Wife.  At the time she had not yet even been my fiancé. I had not corrected him.  The engagement ring lived on my credit card and in the recesses of my sock drawer.  But I sustained myself on the feeling that his assumption built in my belly.  The promise of the feeling’s exponential growth if she were to say “yes” more intoxicating than the scotch burning my throat with each sip._ )  

Her fingernails were small.  Rounded at the nail bed, they were always manicured ( _a Sunday ritual of filing and buffing in front of the television, applying two even coats of pinky nude polish and giggling when I grabbed her hand and blew them dry_ ).  They were  _just long enough_ , offering little assistance in popping open the tab on a can, but they excelling at coaxing stickers off the delicate skins of produce.  Small fingernails that drove me wild when we made love.  Scraping over my forearms as I held myself over her, leaving half-moons in my shoulders as she came, or running along my scalp when I finished inside of her.

Her hands moved when she talked, rising long and white in the air, as though she would catch the future between them and give it shape, would hand me her thoughts as she spoke them, smooth and polished objects, bits of sculptured air.

 _Nineteen more nights in California_.

I woke in the night with Claire’s hand resting over the center of my chest.  Deep in slumber, her cheek rested on her right hand, fingertips just barely grazing her cheekbone.  But her left rested over my sternum, her elbow awkwardly braced on the sliver of mattress between us.

“I’m sorry this is happening,” I whispered that night, studying the slowly fading bruise of sleeplessness ringing her eyes and the swooping lines of bone that had become more pronounced since she came to this place.  My accident was whittling away at the very geography of my wife.   _I_  was carving valleys into caverns.   _I_  was pressing imperfections into a pearl.  “I canna be  _less_  to you.”

She did not stir.

Early in the morning, Claire woke and her gaze flicked between her hand on my chest and my face. “To make sure that it’s working,” she explained, cheeks coloring a rosy pink.  Her fingers curled over my chest, eyes drifting shut again.

Those hands.  Measuring my life.  ( _Our life_.)

_God, those hands._

_Eighteen more nights in California._

 

That first night after my release from the hospital, I had touched her until she woke.  

Getting her into bed with me had taken an act of God. She was settled on sleeping draped over the chaise in the corner of the bedroom.  I couldn’t bear the prospect of her sleeping there –– delicate feet dangling over the edge, the too soft cushion setting her spine in some sort of unnatural contortion.  I was not above begging, eyes wide and licking my lips slowly.  “I want ye to sleep beside me, Sassenach.”

Unsurprisingly, she protested.  ( _Concern of joggling my leg, rolling over on my hand, getting too close to my still-smarting ribs_.)  However, I eventually overcame her reluctance with no small amount of rolling eyes, “ _you bloody Scot_ ,” and “ _you awful, stubborn man_.” She sat on the edge of the bed, brushing out her hair, the smallest of smiles changing her entire face.  Not speaking, I watched her brush and brush and brush.  Something about it was soothing.

Later in the night, I needed my wife to come alive beneath my hands. Partially to banish the dark cloud looming at the back of my mind.  Partially just to sate the call of my male pride, an infernal compulsion to see my wife come apart with a staccato heartbeat, to undo the dark circles my accident had put beneath her eyes, and feel the tension dissolve from her limbs. And when my hands first found their way between her thighs ––  _the flesh there quickly becoming warm, slick, needy_  –– I took no small amount of comfort from her breathlessness, the sounds she made, the straining of her limbs against the mattress, the fiery glint of her wedding ring as she fisted sheets in her hands.

It had been enough that first night.  To love her.  To feel her dissolving.

And then the routine came.

The routine of a short-term life in California that had not been part of either of our plans. The routines constructed brick by brick and that became an empire to structure our days.

Nights became quiet, endless as Claire slept a calculated distance from me.  She was so taken by her awareness of my body, so careful not to bump me.

It left me wanting nearness.

I slept, of course, but not well.

Not the sleep of home.

And with my self-imposed tapering down of pain medication ( _to which she put up little protest_ ), the blue-white light of post-midnight desert became the filter through which I studied her slumbering body.

When I did sleep, the way I woke was different.

Gasping, gulping, sweating, grabbing for my wife over sweat-damp sheets.  Searching for slivers of her flesh as she reached for the bedside lamp, whispering my name.

 _Her hands were anchors._ The hold she took of my hand was like she knew I needed something to hold.  As if I could float away at any moment on the thin edge of a dream.  

_A desert somewhere (Afghanistan, California).  And a nameless hospital someplace else._

The panic in her eyes rose to meet mine until I realized that I was in bed.  Not  _our bed_. But the togetherness evened my pulse.  I wheezed apologies, drawn tight, as she smoothed the lines from between my eyebrows.  She threaded those fingers through mine ( _the open space between mine made for them_ ).  She brought them to her lips and said again and again that it was okay.

“I dinna ken why it is that they’re back,” I sighed when my heart slowed, my breathing evened. “The nightmares.”

With a soft shake of her head, she kissed me soundly, drawing me back down to earth.  The words she whispered calmed my heart.  Over her objections, I gathered her close to me ( _leg be damned, the need for her to be adjacent to me becoming a rudimentary part of me_ ).  The smell of her perfume had been made sleepy in the night, musky and floral on her pulse points as she pressed herself against me.  And when she slept again, I finally felt relief because in slumber I could not destroy her.

 _Seventeen more nights in California_.

The day dawned without me realizing that it would be the day that I broke my wife’s heart.

That morning, the sleepy sounds when she woke were the same.  The soft mumble that came from her made it sound as though she was surprised that the sun had deigned to rise again.  The arch of her breasts under the sheet was familiar, as was the indulgent sigh as her lean arm rose over her head and her fingers found mine.  “ _A little longer_ ,  _Jamie_ ,” she whimpered as I smoothed hair off of her sleep-warm forehead. From the look of her –– serene with pillow-creased cheeks –– she was  _home_ in her mind.

_Waking in Edinburgh to a day of work._

I lived in the moment as long as I could, but when the clock ticked from 8:59 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., I  _had_  to wake her.

I kissed the shell of her ear, committing to memory the drowsy soft scent of her, the moment of her leg insinuating itself between mine ( _in sleep unconscious to my injury or pain_ ), and the warmth of her breasts smashed against my chest.

“Ye need to get up,  _Sorcha_. It’s late.”

She rose with a start, disentangling our limbs with eyes round as pennies as she looked about.

She was disoriented, reeling from the loss of whatever soft dream had slithered away from consciousness upon her waking.

“ _Fuck_. Your appointment is in thirty minutes.” She rolled away from me, hand scrabbling along the floor for  _something_ ( _her watch, her phone, the Lord only knew_ ).  “I’ll shower when we get home.”

 _Home_.

I had innumerable things to say about the slip of her tongue.  It was the opposite feeling wrought by her colleague’s slip of the tongue. Never had I thought invocation of  _home_  would make me feel as if I would be physically ill.

 _Home.  This is not home.  These are the walls that contain our new half-life_.

I bottled the thoughts.  I buried them.  I left the grave unmarked.

She dressed.

It was another day of the same, though she was decidedly undone and rumpled not in a sexy way.  In a broken way that tasted like my own guilt.

Trundling from place to place.

Lumbering in and out of the giant rental SUV with the assistance of my wife.

Attending appointment after appointment. Occupational therapy ( _the mere act of stretching my fingers made me sweat and curse as stiff joints rounded to grip pliable foam_ ).  Orthopedic surgeon ( _the one Claire hated, who called her Dr. Beauchamp-Fraser with such condescension that I asked Claire to step out before reading him the riot act_ ).  Wound care specialists ( _concurring with my wife’s assessment of how each incision, cut, and scrape should be managed_ ).  

Visiting a pharmacy ( _antibiotics, muscle relaxers, pain killers, creams and ointments_ ).  

Trying to cast my eyes aside as my wife assisted me to the public toilets. ( _She said well-meaning things that I am sure were designed to keep me from thinking that she was doing something other than helping me shit.)_

Napping in the afternoon, pillows carefully arranged beneath my leg.

Calling to her to help me to get to the washroom to take a piss.

Watching a daytime chat show, kept quiet in the background.

Pretending not to overhear her calls to insurance companies ( _policy limits and Claire’s tight smile as she shut the door to the second bedroom, assuring me in a hushed tone with a smile that did not reach her eyes that everything was “just fine”)_.

Claire never said anything to make me think she resented having to care for me.  Quite the opposite, she was  _softer_ somehow.  Less prone to rise to banter.  It was almost as bad as an explicit expression of frustration.

 _She was treating me with kid gloves_.

No.

She didn’t resent me.

“Say you hate it,” I mumbled as she handed me my fourth handful of pills for the day.

“Wot?” she asked absently, holding a sweating plastic cup of water at arms length.

“Nothing,  _a nighean_.  Nothing.”

But in the back of my mind the notion was there.

Niggling.

Permanent.  

I was helpless.

I had fallen in love with her without hesitation or question –– just assuming that someday I may have to care for her.  To take on life’s baser tasks.  To fine tune ourselves to a new normal.  To be strong when she was weak.  Despite the solemnity with which I had made that vow to her, I had never imagined her caring for  _me_.

I hated it.

I hated the dependency of it.  The fact that there was no way for me to care for her.  The fact that my decision not to die had done this to her –– made her this stressed, lost shell.  The fact that she spent time listening to the spaces between each of my heartbeats.

_Seventeen more nights in California.  We had seventeen more nights of this._

She was making dinner when I broke her heart. She was preparing a salad in pajama shorts and a top that rode up over her left hip ( _the perfectly constructed parenthesis of her hipbone just barely visible_ ), my doubt refused to abide by the walls that contained it.  

“Ye started yer period today.”  

I said it, unable to take back the observation.

We had been at Target.  I held the shopping basket that she filled with ibuprofen, bananas, bathing suits for each of us ( _based on her declaration that I would be able to go into the backyard pool in a week or so_ ), and what seemed to be an entire battery of different tampons, a heating pad ( _put into the bag with a sigh, her eyes meeting mine only for a moment before darting back to the shelf as she mumbled, “we’ll get there”_ ).

“Yeah, I did.”  She tossed a look over her shoulder, nose wrinkled perfectly pink from the sunshine.  Her cheeks, speckled with a constellation of freckles, had long since ceased to color at such an observation.  She dropped a handful of unartfully diced cucumbers into the salad bowl and resumed her utterly sacrilegious maceration of a rather beautiful heirloom tomato.

“I mean, I didn’t expect that ye’d be pregnant, Claire.”  I spun the dog-eared book of crosswords that we had been working through beneath my middle finger. The gala had been almost a month earlier.   _The last time we had made love; the night of abandon before I’d gone and fucked it all up with ugly accusations about Tom Christie_. “It’s just… the birth control and we’ve barely been together to have sex… and I’m thinking that maybe we should no’… I dinna ken if it matters, but––”

“You don’t have trouble finding a point unless you know you’re about to say something that will infuriate me.”   _That voice_.  It was throaty and frustrated, hardly masking the threat lingering just under the surface. Her eyes were hardened and glowing amber as she set the knife down on the cutting board.  Those eyes threatened to catch me, harden, and suspend me in this moment forever.

“Och, weel… aye.  Ye can be hard to say things like this to and––”

“Just _say it_ Jamie.”   She dried her hands on a towel, fingers knotting into the fabric before she dropped it to the counter.   _Her hands_.  I concentrated on them –– the delicate, life-saving power in them.  She was trembling.

And I  _knew_ , just  _knew_  that I was about to say something that threatened to break her heart.  She would carry this moment with her forever.

And I did not stop.  I could not stop.  I said what was aching in my brain anyway.

“I think we should wait.  We decided to have a bairn before…” My voice faded and I swallowed hard. Surveying the kitchen, I made a vague gesture. “Before all of _this_.”

_Oh God. The stiffening of her posture.  The look on her face –– the glass shattering to expose something almost primal. It was raw pain. I would have given anything to rise from the fucking wheelchair.  To walk to her then, gather her into my arms and tell her that I was sorry._

But the problem was that I could not rise or walk to her.  No more than I could promise to care for her and for a baby.  I was broken.  My body was not mine anymore.  My mind was a jumbled mess.  By day, I was her child.  At night, I was a man in a desert.  Curled under a dying boy, speaking broken, basic Farsi.  Curled on dirt and coated in dust, willing life away.

I could not be sorry for saying it.  She needed to know full well what she would be getting into if she brought a life into the world with me.

“Ye’ve gone quiet.”

“Does that surprise you?” Her voice was quiet but sharp.

“No.  Please.  Say something, Claire.  Anything.”

“You just said that you don’t want to have a baby with me.”

“Ye ken verra well that’s no’ what I said to ye.” I knew that was  _precisely_  what she had heard, the logical centers of her brain tumbling. “I said that I  _think_  we should  _wait_.  Just for a while.”

At that, she got the rumpled look about her like she was going to cry.  I had studied her tear-stained face enough over the past weeks to know her tell.  The way her face went soft above the eyebrows, the tightening of her jaw.

“If this entire…  _thing_ … has taught me anything, it’s that our lives are too bloody short to put things off until  _tomorrow_  or  _later_.”

“We have an entire lifetime together, Claire.”

It was as if she could see the possibility that it was a lie on my face because she barked at me then, hand coming down hard on the counter.“You don’t know that.” The way her hand recoiled, the ringing slap that bounded around the kitchen told me that it must have hurt. “God dammit, Jamie. This is the last thing I thought you’d say to me tonight.”

She turned away.  I am sure she was unaware that her body language was just as expressive as her glass face because her small shoulders closed in on themselves.  She was hiding her breakdown from me, marshaling the parts of herself that would make me think she was cold.

It took everything in me to keep my voice level when I spoke again after a series of seemingly endless minutes.

“I’m no’ saying this to hurt ye.  I’m no’ saying that I dinna want us to have a bairn.  I’d love nothin’ more than to see ye pregnant, create a life wi’ ye. See those hands cupping a fuzzy head.  Take bets on whether it’ll be a wee lad or lassie.  Argue over names together.  But this is no’ the moment for me to do any of those things for ye.  With ye.”

She drew herself up straight but did not turn.  She was plating the fish that she had made for dinner –– carefully assembling slices of lemon alongside the flaky white filets.  “You are going to be  _fine_.”

“I ken that.” Deep down I knew that, though an entire laundry list of everyday  _things_  had written itself in my brain over the last weeks.  It was a list that taunted me, the checkboxes next to each entry unknowable for some undefinable period.  ( _Working.  Cleaning.  Cooking.  Laundry.  Workouts.  Driving.  Walking.  Climbing stairs.  Using a toilet without my wife. Showering. Grocery shopping. Living without braces or pills._    _Making love to my wife how I wanted, my body a shield over hers_.)   “I ken that I’ll be fine because I have the best doctor I could hope for––”

“ _Stop_ ,” she whispered, hands stilling and fingers curling around the edge of the countertops.  “I don’t need flattery or an ego boost.  I am trying to process what you just said to me.”

“Is it age that worries ye––”

“Jamie,” she gasped, turning.  She had started to cry, eyes gone bloodshot and a small shimmer of snot ringing one nostril.  “ _Stop_.  It’s  _nothing_  to do with how old I am.”

“Claire, dinna walk away when ye ken that I canna follow ye.”  She looked at me from the doorway, fingers curling around the back of her neck. My voice was imploring, failing, when I said, “ _Please_.”

“I love you.  Madly.  It consumes me.” She inhaled, shaking her head and dropping her hands to her sides.  “But I don’t  _want_  you to follow me right now, Jamie.”

Regret flooded her.  Her very life was leaking from the tips of her fingers. She looked so small in her clothes.

She had lashed out to hurt me.

And I couldn’t blame her.


	17. Part Seventeen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The loss of the names that we have for things.

**Loss (Act II)**

**Part Seventeen**

I knew why the world’s religions had nine hundred names for God.  

( _Yahweh, Elohim, Jehovah, Nkosi, Allah_.   _On and on, uncountable names to call in prayer –– as a plea, to build a relationship, in search of guidance._ )

One small word is not enough for love.  Nor is one small word enough for heartbreak.

( _A name.  A thousand names.  Alexander.Oliver.  Euan.Henrietta.Julia.  Sophia.On and on, innumerable names that Jamie and I tried in our respective accents, paired with hypothetical middle names, and pictured in neat black lettering on a birth certificate.  An infinity of combinations of our DNA possible._ )

On our second weekend together, Jamie and I had an intimate ( _and relatively sexy_ ) conversation about birth control.

_IUD.  Condoms.  Common sense._

That conversation set the tone for our first bit of time together.  Jamie never complained. He knew it was what I wanted ( _needed_ ) in order to be intimate.  And that was enough.The fact that he had a preferred brand of contraception was endearing and the game that sometimes broke out over it was usually resulted in an explosive bit of foreplay.  

_Back in those days.  His reverence for me.  It had been a turn on._

Ultimately, I had been the one to suggest that we retire the condoms.

It had been a Sunday morning relatively early in our relationship.  Before we moved in together.The novelty of our budding connection was still there, but we were undeniably comfortable with one another.

 _We were lived in_.

We said ‘ _I love you’_ with some regularity, but with unpracticed tongues.  ( _Our mouths would curl around the syllables in the very intentional act of expressing the sentiment.  Eyes open, we would drink one another’s words and facial expressions, echoing one another to make ourselves more familiar with the ritual._ )

_And then that Sunday._

Jamie had been deep asleep.  I was hungry, restless and reeling from the type of sleeplessness wrought only by shift work.  He only cracked one eye to tell me to “ _knock it off, Sassenach_ ” when I tapped along his sternum in an attempt to wake him. Endeavoring to take full advantage of the agreement we had brokered that it was generally _just fine_ to wake one another _like that_ , I put my hands to work.  With that touch, he did not tell me to knock it off, but he did call me “Sassenach” until I wondered if it was the only bit of his vocabulary remaining.

After a shower, we ventured ( _hand-in-hand_ ) to the café around the corner from his flat.  We were making our grocery lists in tandem over bitter coffee and too-sweet scones when I suggested it without preamble.  Tracing a finger through the insignificant avalanche of artificial sweetener that had fallen to the table like snow, I said that I was ready to be finished with doubling down on the protection, but only if he was.

Jamie looked at me over the rim of his glasses as though I was a trickster setting a trap.  As the suggestion echoed between us, I drew a small, swooping _J_ in the sweetener.  Blushing over the sentimentality of my tabletop artwork ( _not the intimacy of my ask_ ), I gathered the fake sugar into a line with the edge of the pale yellow paper packet.

His non-responsiveness was making me second guess not only my approach, but the entire idea.  I quickly added, “I mean, if you’re comfortable with it.I don’t want to pressure you into anything… I mean…. The IUD will still be there. I’m not asking you to have a baby with me.”

“Weel, ye ken that if I were to have a bairn, ye’re the one I’d love to be its ma––”

“ _Stop_ ,” I interrupted with a snort, shaking my head as I looked up from the thin, powdery line. “I’m being serious.”

I caught his eyes ( _sparkling, but narrowed in concentration_ ), watched the laughter dying on my lips.   I looked back to my line of sweetener before scoring hash marks along it and wiping my fingertips on my coat.  

Arms crossed, I confessed something that was so self-evident that it likely did not _need_ confessing. “It just feels _better_.   _Would_ feel better.  For _me_.  For _you_.”

“Oh aye?”

“Stop.  You’re teasing me.” I reached into the depths of my handbag and extracted an envelope containing a carefully-folded lab report, only days old from a visit to my GP.  From the moment I had pulled it out of the mailbox until I reviewed it halfway up the stairwell, shaking like a total nut, I’d been somehow _nervous_ to know.  “I know you had just had a test when we––”

“Started up?”

 _Oh that smirk of his.  Started up.That was one way to describe the birth of our relationship.  The thing that had become most dear to me in the world_. “Sure. Anyway, there are eleven tests in the panel. Each test was negative on your results, mine. And I take it that I can take you at your word that you’ve been only with me since then.”

When he did not take the envelope from my extended hand, I set it onto the table over the sweetener.  He did not even bother to glance at it.It was as though it didn’t exist.

“Of course ye can trust that, Claire.  I’m utterly besotted wi’ ye. And now tell me why it would feel better.”

 _He was fixated.  Probably just for the pleasure of hearing me say it, measuring my reaction, driving me wild_.

Goosebumps erupted along the backs of my arms, along my shoulder blades.  He was playing with me, but it was sexy.

And so I played along.  In exhaustive, colorful detail. 

Explaining how I wanted the feeling of his skin on my skin.  I had dreamt of the rush of knowing he could feel exactly what he was doing to me.  How I yearned for our bodies not to lose the rhythm of foreplay as he slid home without pause.  The promise of discovering what sounds he would make, his facial expressions, the feeling when our reptilian brains identified the exact moment when the time was right.  No pauses, just instinct.And in the end, I intimated that future wake-up calls may involve more than just hands.Perhaps a creative use of my mouth, if we had an agreement.

My efforts were rewarded with an almost laughable reaction from him. ( _The tops of his ears went pink, the tip of his tongue darted out uncontrollably, the ring finger of his left hand twitched, and the hairs on the backs of his broad hands to rose as if they had been drawn up by static._ )

Without explanation, he struck ‘ _rubbers_ ’ from the contents of his shopping list.  A single, neat stroke of his pen, and we were in a whole new world.  Together.Folding the scrap of paper and stashing it away alongside his pen in the breast pocket of his button down shirt, he finished his drink in a single grimacing gulp. “Are ye about finished wi’ that grotty auld scone and disgusting coffee?”

Draining my cup with a long sip, I gave him a level look.  He appeared almost wild –– eyes bright, lips parted.“Ready for groceries?”

“Ready for _something_ ,” he said, voice low and leaning forward onto his elbows.

We never made it any further than back around the corner to his flat.

Together we rediscovered one another.

_The heat.  The free range of his touch.  The watery, meaningful look in his eyes as he slipped into me the first time with no barrier.  The new, exquisite friction between at the first meeting of our skin. The throbbing before he surrendered, the wick of sweat in the wiry hairs below his navel in the moments before he finished. The groaning the second time when he described how good I felt.  (“Ye’re like velvet inside,” he confessed reverently before burying his face in my hair, drawing my earlobe between his teeth.At my resulting hiss, his fingers molded flesh.My left breast.My right buttock.)The protracted moments of touching, our breathing slowing as we basked in one another.  His usual hurry to slip free of me barely even a memory as he just rested, the feeling of the soft sated purr vibrating in his chest.A sound I had heard him make before but never been able to feel along the length of my bones.The untidy intimacy of cleaning one another after the last._

_Again and again_.

I had never felt even _remotely_ platonic with James Fraser. We were always _something more_.

But I _felt_ him that day in a way that I never had –– under my skin, in my brain, nestled in the spaces between my ribs, and turning me to another state of matter. ( _The solid of my being became plasma –– moldable, the molecular bonds holding me together dissociating and scattering._ )  He felt me.  It was not the feeling of bare skin that did it.  It was the feeling of being completely, hopelessly stripped bare to one another.

We ordered groceries.  He worked remotely the next day, shirtless as he answered emails.  We were mostly well behaved, save a breath-stealing quickie in which I bent myself over his countertop and a prolonged shower that involved little talking and a lot of soap.

I did not leave until Tuesday morning when I had to go to work.

Then, the second step.

Another conversation on the eve of my appointment.  ( _“I think we’re almost ready, aye?” he’d said one night when some silly commercial advertising some sort of cloth nappy service came on the television.  I had not needed to ask what he was talking about.I had just nodded, agreed, held dear the hummingbird flutter of expectation in my chest._ )  My IUD had reached the end of its lifespan.  Another barrier stripped back, with the promise of taking a final leap in a few months’ time.

 _After this wedding, that long weekend holiday, a baptism, and a timeline to avoid being nine months pregnant in August_.

I presented the small copper device to him in a sealed yellow biohazard bag over curry. When he just stared, I set it in the center of the table. “I’m switching to the pill,” I explained, adding black pepper to my dish. He wrinkled his nose, snorting with no small amount of disgust as he looked at the table. “Oh come on.  I’m trying to be romantic.And it was just in my uterus and that bag is basically impenetrable.”

He had shaken his head. “It’s not that. Ye’re adding _pepper_ to _curry_.  Ye’ve the most awful palate for anything that doesn’t have a fistful of sugar in it.”

I beamed at him, watching as he picked up the bag.

“This wee thing was our goalkeeper?”

“Yes.  That’s it.  There was no sense getting another IUD when we’re close to trying.”

He hummed a low sound, laughing a bit.  

“Getting it put in and taken out is not what I’d call a treat.”

I am sure it was mostly to humor me, but he put it in his front breast pocket.  It reminded me of that café. _That shopping list._ I have no idea what he did with it after that.

And then the third and final act in our evolution.

The pill disappeared.

With nothing left between us, we embarked on the exhilarating mission of creating life.  Quietly, we talked about names in the moments after we made love.

_Charlotte.  Amelia.Norah.  Ellen._

He was choking on the name of his mother, thumb above my navel.

_Charles.  David.Nicholas.  Quentin._

My own breath caught.

Those hushed tones in which we spoke were louder than the thundering of a drum.

_And now._

Now, in hushed tones, I breathed rasping breaths into the palms of my hands.  Hands covered in the blood of our expectations, my own drool, my own snot, my own tears.  Surgeon’s hands that quaked horribly, inconsolably even as I attempted to steady them over my knees.

I had just _walked away_ from him.

He had asked me not to walk away, but I had.

I had walked away from my husband who was wheelchair bound and pleading with me.

 _I was a fucking monster_.

With little idea of where to go—fingers curling around the car keys at the bottom of my purse almost longingly and eyes on the trainers that John had brought over for me when he had returned for a few days—I ended up in the backyard.

Jamie’s mobile was essentially unusable—its screen shattered and his own blood filling the cracks.  He could _probably_ get to his feet on his own, but there’s no way he would be able to do more than get a few feet without crutches, and with his reconstructed, still-healing hand, he wasn’t allowed to bear the weight necessary to use them.

He was stuck here.  ( _Or perhaps, more precisely, stuck in the kitchen._ )

And because he was stuck, I was, too.

And I was dissolving.

It was half past eight in California.

The sun had long disappeared beyond the horizon in the desert.  It had yet to rise in Scotland.Even on a work day, I would not yet have been awake in our own bed.  In the desert, it was dark, still, quiet, save the air conditioning.If it weren’t for the unit cycling at the back of the bungalow ( _a repetitive hum, click, pause_ ), I would have wondered if I had lost my hearing entirely.

 _It was so god damned quiet everywhere but my brain_.

I wanted to talk to someone.

 _Someone who was not Jamie_.

Between the early hour at home and the swell of emotion in my guts that I would never able to describe, I had no clue who to call.

So I thought instead.

The devastating words my husband had spoken.  ( _I think we should wait.  Wait.Wait.Wait._ )   I felt like I was swelling. ( _My brain.  My guts._ )  The fact that I had walked away.  The entire mess of our lives.The anger that I felt growing against my better judgment.

I wanted to scream until my throat was raw, my voice cracking.

_We had a plan, damn you.  I did not believe that we lived a life to pay for the sins of a previous existence, but nonetheless found myself asking what did we do to deserve this._

He would never make me do something I did not want to do.  I knew that much, but I wanted to argue with him.I wanted to cajole him into _sticking with the plan_.  

But if the situation were reversed, I knew my husband.  I knew that he would never exert _pressure_ on me to have a baby or do something that I did not want to do.  

And I suddenly hated him for it.  Hatred was an ugly emotion.

I gnawed down on the inside of my cheek.  I spat the blood that rushed my mouth, gagging.

I looked everywhere, save behind me.

I knew what I would see if I looked inside that bungalow ( _I hate it, hate it, hate it_ ). If I turned, I would see _him_.  Sitting there at the kitchen table, likely with some destroyed expression on his broken face ( _broken from his fall; broken from me, my actions and words_ ).  And I knew that whatever the look on his face, it would mirror the one on my own. Matching black holes that would suck the rest of me clean off the bone, that would snuff the only remaining light from his eyes.

_No.  I would not turn around._

I focused on the potted cacti growing in a proud, arrow-straight spire towards the sky.  The hardening blister where my thong sandals rubbed my toes raw.

_I understand.  I know.Things have changed.  You are not saying “no.”This is not your fault.  I know it is irrational, but…_

_I hate you._

_You broke my heart._

_You, Jamie Fraser, make me sick._

_No, this_ **_situation_ ** _makes me sick._

_Not you.  Never you.  I am sorry.So sorry._

When temptation to turn struck me ( _just to catch a glimpse of him_ ), I refocused my attention to a careful inspection of the chip in my geranium-red toenail polish. ( _Watching television the night before, I had fastidiously lacquered them, securing a laugh from Jamie as I awkwardly duck walked towards the kitchen for a pint of ice cream to share_.) I inhaled the scent of campfire.  Moments later, the taste of it was smokey and acrid on my palate.  I gagged again, bringing up the contents of my stomach and then only liquid.

A disembodied sensation stole the head from my shoulders, made my fingertips tingle and my eyes burn. I leaned forward on the lounge chair and suspended what was left of my upper body between my knees.

I hadn’t had sights on some grand romantic gesture that evening, but I had put the bikini I’d purchased on underneath my clothes.  I was still reluctant to let Jamie submerge himself in the swimming pool, but had figured that we could maneuver him up onto the raised edge of the hot tub and allow his feet to dangle into the water.

Foolishly, I’d let my mind run away with visions of us finishing the dinner I cooked –– fish and quinoa, a salad filled with all manner of sunny veg and tangy homemade dressing. I had planned to say that we should wait to do the dishes and instead spend some time outside. He would protest and I’d slip out of my t-shirt and shorts, asking if the bikini changed his mind.  His protest forgotten, we would have a normal moment.I would stand between his legs in the hot tub. 

_Kiss him.  Touch him.Tease him.  Love him._

My moment of nostalgia for not a moment past, but instead for a fantasy never realized was interrupted by tapping.

Out of instinct, I turned to the noise.  Jamie was at the window, bracing himself on the pane with furrowed brows and red-rimmed eyes.  I leapt to my feet as he fought with the window, pulling it open.I wanted to swear at him –– tell him to leave me alone to stew, to let me find my way out of the chokehold the situation had on me.

“Don’t you dare fall on that new hand,” I snapped, brimming with concern as I rounded the lounger and clipping my shin on it.  I breathed a series of curse words, reaching for it and hissing at the feeling of my own blood leaking from what was probably no more than a small laceration.

“Are ye okay?”

“ _I’m fine_.”

_A moment.  Actual blood on my hands now.  Great._

“Come inside.”

He was not asking.  He was not telling.He was not giving permission.  He was _hoping_.

I mopped my cheeks with the palms of my hands, belatedly realizing that I probably had just smeared blood on my face.

“Come talk to me, _mo nighean donn_.”

Again.  

 _Just hope_.  

That’s all there was.  

Snuffling, I nodded.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These two are so close to a breakthrough and refinding the pieces of themselves that they've lost. I want to cry with relief over it.


	18. Part Eighteen

 

* * *

 

##  **Loss (Act II)  
** **Part Eighteen**

In another life ( _with my formerly hot head and a heart that was wholly my own_ ), I would have screamed at him.  Beat at the doors of his chest until his flesh opened and his sternum cracked apart to unsheathe his heart.

That heart.

Pulsating and glistening, surrounded by the jagged teeth of his exposed ribs.  In another circumstance ( _his cold feet_ ), I would have laid myself bare to him, kissed his cheeks and his mouth.   _Begged for him to come back to me, to come back to my plan, our plan_.  

In a parallel universe, I did those things.

In this one –– the buzz of air conditioning pushing cold air into the bungalow my world that was again hanging in the balance–– I just stood at the doorway.

_How had distance become our master?_

In our years together, Jamie had rarely been guarded.  His walls went up only in two narrow circumstances.  First, if we were arguing, and the prospect of letting me in was a concession he was unprepared to make. Second, if he thought he was protecting me from something.

But if eyes were windows to his soul, he could make the panes fog up on demand.  I could stare at him ( _the person I knew best in the world, the person before whom I had long been emotionally and physically naked_ ), and see nothing. His face would remain controlled and impassive until he willed it otherwise.

I reached for him, to help him sit back down.

“ _Don’t_.”  

The distance had shaken its head, told me ‘no,’ and wagged its finger.  

My hand fell.  I had been silly to think that in this moment, when we were both hurting, that he would want to be cared for.

“Ye’ve done enough.  I’m  _fine_.” The show of pain on his face made my heart skip and my mouth go dry.  “Ye dinna need to––”

Something flared inside me, white hot. “To  _what_?  _Be here_? You’ve got it handled? All of this?”

My tone was violence and I threw my hands up.  Exasperated.  Empty.  Exposed. I had not intended the tone or the gesture, but it was there, my hands circling in the air wildly as if to say  _all of this? this is what you have handled? please_.

“I dinna need ye to help me sit.”

He lowered himself onto a kitchen chair, knitting his fingers together and exhaling a low, relieved sound.  He looked askance.  My gaze matched the trajectory, searching to figure out where he was looking. The tile floor.  A careful study of the edge of rug curling up ( _a plain tripping hazard_ ) beneath the table.  In my peripheral vision I saw him work an uneasy hand through his hair.

Not looking at me, he said, “I need ye here.  I need ye always, but especially now.”

I tipped my head back, looking at the ceiling with tears blistering my eyes.  “I came inside too soon.  I need––”

“What ye need, and what I need, might be separate from what  _we_  need right now.”

I swallowed hard, chin crumpling.  “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that for the good of our  _relationship_  we need to  _talk_.”

I blinked, inhaled, planted my feet.

“Do ye hate me for it, Claire?” he asked plainly, looking disconnected from the weight of his question.  

It was styled like some mundane inquiry. Like asking me to pass the cream or sugar bowl. To lower the volume on the car radio.  Whether he needed an umbrella. If the dog had been out of doors to urinate or why I was eating the parsley garnishing my plate at a restaurant.

“I don’t.”

 _It was the truth, but I fought to say it aloud._   I stared for a moment, realizing he wanted a more complete statement.  I blinked.  ( _A deliberate crushing together of eyelids to banish the tears that threatened my vision, my entire being, the façade I’d constructed to deal with this –– angry tears, hot and uncontrollable, the first steps in brewing an absolute breakdown_.)

“ _Hate you_? I don’t  _hate_  you. I don’t think I could ever  _hate_  you.”

He made a Scottish noise ( _smaller, sadder than the usual show of his disillusionment_ ).  “So tell me.”

“Tell you  _what_?” I asked.  Words became brass knuckles to his simple request.  

“Whatever is in that curly heid of yers.  I’m sure it’s no’ too charitable to me now.”

There was no room left in my heart to be evasive, no space left in my mouth for a half-truth, so I blurted it out. The truth that formed the bedrock of where we were in the moment. “You realize that you  _died_  in that ambulance.”

He sucked in a breath, as if he were considering the reality of it all for the first time.  He  _knew_ , but it was sinking in.  “I know.”

“Let’s call this what it is, okay?  I won’t tiptoe around why I’m angry.”

He looked away from me, attention cast out the window towards that blue swimming pool. Apparently we had one thing in common –– looking at one another while I said whatever I had to say would be too much.

“Before all of this, I’d never seriously entertained the notion that I might lose you.”

He curled in on himself for a moment, a brief flicker disrupting his posture as he squared his shoulders. An absent-minded hand tested what I assumed was a smarting rib.

I knew I did not have to say the rest:  _You’re everything to me.  Everything I love revolves around you and us, what you help me to become._

“And if you leave me alone, without some piece of you, I will  _never_  fucking forgive you.”

Jamie let out a laugh that was as breathless as it was humorless.

I had survived ( _and thrived_ ) on decades’ worth of trips around the sun.  In that time, there were men whose bed I shared, whose names I whispered after saying “ _I love you_ ” or “ _I need you_ ” ( _phrases with a gravitas I had not yet had cause to master_ ), men whose loss to me had felt like nothing more than a scratch or scrape.  I had lived alone –– with science to fill my time, a few good girlfriends with whom I could share wine, a familiarity with a few vibrating toys, and the miracles that my own hands could work.

But those lives were before I fell stupidly in love with James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.

I could not bear to be alone again.

“And if  _I_  were to die, Jamie, don’t you want to have––”

“ _Enough_.”  His voice rose from the center of him, disembodied and projected with a coldness turned my spine to ice.  The chill spared no part of me as it spread through each nerve, drew each hair on my body to attention.

Despite his request ( _a command_ ), I wanted to continue:  _Our lives, they’re fleeting, delicate things_.  _I need that piece of you (that peace).  And if I go, you need that. You need it, too._

Neither of us spoke.  We allowed an entire millennia of aching, silent moments to pass.

I took hold of the countertop, my body threatening to bring me down to my knees.  Not to beg, but just to draw myself closer to the core of the earth.  His head sagged a bit.  I did not step towards him or reach for him.   _Not this time_.

“You don’t get to draw me into a conversation, have me tear myself to shreds, and then tell me ‘ _enough_ ,’” I said after a time, my patience not yet worn thin, but my resolve for honey-coating my words entirely gone.  “What I’m saying might not be  _fair_ , but it’s what’s in my fucked up, dazed head.  I didn’t have time to sort my thoughts.  _You_  asked me to come talk to you.”

He turned towards me, eyes watery in a way that floated all of the secrets he had out to sea.

_Those eyes._

I had seen them a million times and in a million ways.

Flirtation and inebriation.  Searching until they made me float, stripping me away from gravity.  Wanting.  Melting away a wildly aching solitude, his flesh like a poem against bed sheets as his eyes opened.  Surprise and awe, reverence.  Exhaustion and burning.

This was new though.

The essence of mortality and existence.  The threat that the love we had for each other would be the thing to tear us apart.

“Ye think I dinna want a bairn? Christ. It’s been on my mind for  _years_ , Claire. Before ye could even debase yerself enough to consider the possibility of being the mother to my children.”

“ _Debase_  myself?”

“Oh, aye.  _Debase_  yerself.  All that work it took ye to stop runnin’ from me.”

“Is that what you think of our relationship? Of me? That I was  _running_  from you?  That I  _ran_  from you?”

I met his narrowed glare –– glinting triangles of a tempestuous sea. I swallowed again and again, but the lump in my throat was a wily beast and refused to clear.  “Ye canna pretend that it came easy for ye.  Loving me.  I ken that ye love me now.  I’m no’ an idiot.  But ye didna make getting here easy.”

“I’m not tracking your point.   _Is there_  a point?  Or are you trying to hurt me?”

In the bog of his silence, I reminded myself of certainties forming the very core of us.

_We were a bastion._

_Made to withstand the storm._

_The thrashing of the elements._

_The sea._

_Time._

_We would make it._

_This too would calm; the tempest would quieten._

_Jamie would heal, his words would dull, and this moment (these days and weeks) would be nothing more than a detour in a timeline._

The distance again –– swelling and throbbing, always growing, distorting truths into slights.

“I’ll no’ mince words wi’ ye. Do ye ken the amount of self-control it took me? Not to ask ye again and again to have a bairn when I kent ye werena ready?”

I could not stop myself.  I rolled my eyes, shook my head.  Not out of exasperation or anger, but of disgust that  _here we were again_.  Talking about it once more.  “I thought you  _respected_  my decision, Jamie.  You loved me enough to let me make decisions about my body.”

“And what about respecting  _my decision_  right now, Claire?”

He was dredging up things that had been long buried, but he was  _right_.  The patience he’d had with me.   _Damn him_.  But it was fundamentally unfair. The space between us was growing even as he split himself open to me, laying bare the tender, pulpy bits of himself.

“Ye see then, what it’s like? To have someone tell ye ‘no’ when ye’re ready?  I never begrudged ye for it –– for yer need to wait.  Not for one second.  Ye dinna ken how many times I was asked and said that  _we_ werena ready.  Can ye respect my decision, even a little?”

“I  _do respect_  your decision.  Why can’t you see that?”  I wanted to scream, to stamp my feet, to sink my small hands into the expanse of his shoulders. To push. To see if he would move.  Getting into his face would have been infinitely more satisfying, but I remained standing. My hands limp, useless tools at my sides.  “But am I not allowed to mourn the  _plan_  that we had?”

“Of  _course_  ye are allowed to mourn it.”

The way he rose to his feet then made my heart skip.  There was nothing graceful or inspiring about it.  It was as though the ground were crumbling beneath him or his entire body was falling in reverse.  But if everything else that night had chilled me, made me feel displaced and adrift, the look on his face then brought me back.

“I hate myself for doing this to ye.”

“Don’t say that,” I whispered, feeling the burn of tears for the thousandth time since I had arrived in California.  I would never tell him that I had considered hating him, the feeling a brewing sickness at the back of my mind. “I can’t bear you hating yourself, Jamie.”

“It’s no’ long that I’m asking for.”  He was making his way to me in a shuffling, hopping sort of way.  I could not bring myself to tell him to stop.  “A few months.”

He braced himself on the counter.  My senses perked at the nearness of him, the muffled smell of sleep and the tangy sweat of his unmedicated pain.  His eyes were locked on mine and his palm came first –– as though my body had a gravitational pull to it.

_He was going to touch me._

“Will ye give me a few months, Sassenach?”

I stepped into his hand, felt goosebumps pinching tight along my lower back at the contact.

He was blinking in the hard, furious way of a man trying to avoid shedding tears. I couldn’t bear not touching him.  So I did, curled my fingers along his stubbled jaw, pressed my thumb into his chin.  “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

He turned his cheek further into my palm, almost nuzzling it.

“I wish you would tell me what is in your heart.”  The snuffling noise deep in his throat ( _a distraction_ ) rattled me.  I averted my eyes and then called them back to his face.  “It’s not a service to me or a show of strength to keep it inside.”

The noise again, a sigh.  Resignation as the soft burr of his words started.  “I’m not right, ye ken.  When I sleep, I see things that’ve been long put to bed.”  

He swallowed, licked his lips.  He closed his eyes.  Tension took residence along the crease of his eyelids and in his drawn brow.   _He did not need to tell me what he saw._

“I ken that ye dinna need  _protection_ , per se, but I need to be  _able_  for ye.  For a bairn.  I need to be able to run up and down the stairs for ye in the night, to get ye a warm blanket from the dryer, to take…”

 _A breath._ My anticipation drew me nearer to him, the slippery fabric of his shorts against my bare legs.

“... _her_  from yer arms after ye nurse her.  To jog about a nursery wi’ her until she sleeps, to help ye to yer feet from the rocking chair I mean to build for ye.”

 _A sigh_.  The soft, melting parts of me made me woozy.  I rested my forehead over the middle of his chest.

“We need to reconnect before any of it.  I need to banish those dreams again.  I need to feel like more than yer patient.  I want to be whole again.”

I could only nod.

“We’ll have a bairn. Just a few months, Sorcha.  That’s all I am askin’ ye for.”

_Our perfect autumn._

_The squashes in my garden.  The pile of logs near the fireplace that he kept permanently stocked.  The sound of our dog’s toenails on the wood floors in the middle of the night as he went for a slurp of water.  The low mumble of my husband as he rolled towards me for warmth, arms snaking under the same covers that he had willfully rejected when we had gone to bed.  The season that had been partially defined by trying to create a life (quiet, slow moments where we adjusted my limbs to comport with old wives’ tales about positioning my body just right to let baby-making magic happen or a fully-clothed quickie in his godfather’s bathroom during a birthday party) coming to a quiet end in a rented home halfway around the world._

_A season lost._

_A season dismissed._

_It would be winter when we got home._

_The spring._

_We would try in the spring._

I drew his hand tighter to my belly, feeling his fingers tense.  “We’ll try in the spring.”

He made a low, Scottish noise.   _Agreement, maybe._

“If you’re ready,” I added, a conciliation I was not sure I could ever truly mean.  He snuffled, a surprising riot of snot gurgling in his nasal passages. “Until then, we practice.”

This time when he laughed, it was real.  When he said “ _oh, aye, we will practice_ , _”_ choked out over a laugh and through smiling lips,I felt renewed.

I dropped my head to his chest, sighed as his fingers wove into my curls and his lips found the top of my head.  The world disappeared for a few moments there in that kitchen.  The conversation.  The fact that he had probably been on his feet for too long.  The place where we were.  The blood on my shin.   

 _We were together_. And it was enough.  It always would be.


	19. Part Nineteen

> ##  **Loss (Act II)  
> ** **Part Nineteen**
> 
> My fingerprints lived in magazines.
> 
> The ghostly remnants of my touch forged an acquaintance with the disembodied arches, ridges, and whorls of countless other waiting room souls.
> 
> Patients.  
> 
> Their loved ones and caretakers.  
> 
> All frightened, nervous, and ( _perhaps, like me_ )entertaining the first gilt flickers of a tempting hope through their fog of panic.
> 
> These unknown people were my waiting room comrades.
> 
> If they were anything like me, they sat waiting and paying only half of their attention to the articles on which they left their shadowy imprints.  
> 
> The articles had little relation to the parade of horribles that would bring anyone to a hospital waiting room.  
> 
> Rankings of various cashmere sweaters that took into account durability, color range, cost, and softness.  
> 
> Debates over whether certain sleep positions caused premature aging coupled with an admonitions to sleep on backs and purchase silk pillowcases.  
> 
> Explicitly illustrated tidbits relating ways to “get him hot” and “keep him interested.”  
> 
> Horoscopes purporting to demystify the future ( _as a Libra, I could apparently look forward to a torrid affair with a stranger and an unexpected windfall of cash before Christmas_ ).
> 
> Curling pages with earlier waiting room patrons’ half-finished crossword puzzles ( _the chicken scratch of some poor speller making my stomach flip at the memory Jamie penciling in_   _my inaccurate guesses with my equally questionable spelling with a tight, stoic expression_ ).
> 
> I was not sure why I bothered to read at all.  Opening a magazine was a feeble attempt to to distract from what happened across the hall.
> 
> Physical therapy.
> 
> Appointments blocked in forty-five minute increments.
> 
> Three quarters of an hour for me to memorize the useless passages, inhale the smell of hospital and ingest its institutional coffee while categorizing staff by their brightly-colored athletic shoes.  The employees smiled as they walked by, bipedal embodiments of the framed messages lining the walls. ( _JUMP IN! Platitudes about MOTIVATION and ACHIEVEMENT. And –– my favorite –– appeals to call on SPIRIT as a gateway to healing._ )  In return for their little waves, I offered closed-lipped smiles and pretend to give a fuck about an column detailing  _101 ways to organize in the new year_  ( _an article helpful as 2018 wound up, but in the pages of a magazine published in 2017_ ).  
> 
> Absently flipping through a home and garden magazine, my eyes attached to everything but the articles under my fingers.  
> 
> The clock on the wall that ran a minute faster than my watch. ( _My fingers closed over the watch face and I entertained my usual litany of morose thoughts about time_ ).  
> 
> The entrance to the physical therapy room where Jamie was receiving his daily allotted physio from 3:15 to 4:00 p.m. ( _My neck ached as I angled just so for a glimpse of him through the narrow, single-paned window on the door._ )  
> 
> The rubbery smudge of someone’s dark-soled tennis shoe. ( _The half moon of a stutter step just beyond the physical therapy room providing evidence of an over-confidence in the healing process_.)
> 
> My watch said that only five minutes left of the appointment remained.  
> 
> The clock disagreed. Four minutes.  
> 
> I swallowed the tar-colored dredges of my coffee, quit pretending to read the article ( _having tried and failed over four consecutive days_ ), and dropped the magazine to the stack of other well-worn periodicals. I had just set about my daily archaeological expedition to dig car keys out from the bottomless pit of my handbag when I heard him call to me from down the hall.
> 
> “ _Sassenach_?” His voice was low and soft, but it easily caught my attention. He sounded  _sexy_ , sure despite the rise of a question in his tone.
> 
> I slipped my middle finger through the keyring, my head snapping up and swiveling.
> 
> _Christ, he was tall._
> 
> Time froze.
> 
> He was upright.  
> 
> _Smiling_.  
> 
> He took one step assisted by a set of crutches, injured leg hovering almost supernaturally above ground. The rubber feet on each crutch made a disgusting squelching sound on the over-polished floor. A sound that I would pay to hear over and over on repeat for the rest of my life.
> 
> “Crutches,” I breathed, taking in the changed physicality of him now that he was vertical, not seated.  A small smile stained my lips ( _likely forever_ ).
> 
> Tips of his toes encased in too-white Nikes, low-cut socks.
> 
> The anatomy of his ankles in bumps and lines beneath tanned skin.
> 
> Low-hanging athletic shorts on narrow hips ( _purchased, folded, and put away in the bungalow by John when I was catatonic with grief over the entire matter_ ).
> 
> Fingers on the cushioned handgrip ( _the purple lines of healing still visible on the fingers of his left hand, again capable of gripping, supporting him after weeks of occupational therapy_ ).
> 
> Chest curving as he pitched forward on the crutches to gather momentum ( _his body was so broad between his arms, pride apparent in the way he held himself despite his regrettable posture_ ).  
> 
> An amused mouth ( _tilted into a smile that changed the shape of his stubbled jaw_ ) and eyebrows raised quizzically over eyes that positively glittered ( _the cat who got the canary_ ).  
> 
> “Aye, crutches,” he echoed, swinging a little recklessly towards me.  
> 
> Without a conscious decision to move, I launched myself from the waiting room chair and towards him, sending my handbag careening to the floor.  Lip gloss, my wallet, keys, prescription bottles, phone, change, and a box of condoms skittered and rolled, bounding off the walls and crunching under my feet as I fell towards him.
> 
> He huffed as I hit his chest ( _a little too hard, a little too exuberantly_ ) and folded about him like the wrapping on a present. Arms and hands finding purchase on the plane of his back, I hiccuped in a state far too stunned to cry. The t-shirt clad expanse of him was solid as a rock, but soft and sweaty-warm beneath my cheek.  His nose worked along the part in my hair, the rattling exhale that started in his chest and worked its way out of his nostrils strong enough to ruffle my curls.  His voice cracked when he mumbled, “Fuck the wheelchair.”
> 
> “Fuck the wheelchair.” My face hurt, unable to mask the joy in my voice, my fingers too tight and too insistent in his flesh.  
> 
> I could feel his heartbeat.
> 
> The settling growl of his stomach.
> 
> The moderated rise and fall of his breathing.
> 
> The spider silk cushion of chest hair under his shirt.
> 
> The pure delight of the moment coursing through him as he awkwardly hugged me, crutches becoming spare appendages dangling from his armpits, lips pressed firmly against my scalp.  I melted into his form, eyes closing and fingertips scraping down his flanks.
> 
> People passed us in their bright, squeaking shoes, giving us only a momentary once over as they lifted eyes from the small screens that held their attention. I ignored them, curling further into him as the heaviness in my stomach dissipated and choking out a laugh when one of his crutches fell to the floor with a sharp, metallic clang.
> 
> Kisses freckled my cheeks, the space between my eyebrows as I let out a great breath against his shirt.  My fingers crept between the hem of his shirt and his waistband, relishing the tickle of goosebumps that rose there.  Just as I had started to wonder if something would ever pull us apart, his stomach let out the most disgusting, painful growl ever.
> 
> Pulling back, I looked down between us with a furrowed brow.  “Are you sure you’re okay?”
> 
> “Aye,” he chuckled, dropping a final kiss on the tip of my nose.  “I’m better than just fine.  Let me take ye out to dinner? A nice, early bird dinner wi’ yer auld husband?”
> 
> In the moment, I answered that there would be nothing better than a dinner together.  
> 
> Only seconds later, though, I identified something that was far better than just  _dinner_.  
> 
> Just walking down the hall with my husband was better.  Seeing the sea of sorrow in him drain in the drought of forward progress was better.  Watching his limbs work together ( _albeit a bit awkwardly as he attempted to find the rhythm of upright movement again_ ) was better.  Seeing the tightness of his resolved mouth, body absorbing the jolt of his crutches with each step traveled was better.  Seeing his confident rejection of my assistance as I reached to open the car door for him was better.  The ice-cold feeling as he teetered a little, hopping before climbing into the passenger’s seat of the car was better.  Melting at his stupid little grin as he knocked his knuckles on the dashboard, saying, “ _let’s go_ ,” was akin to the feeling I had when I spoke my vows at our wedding.
> 
> And I drove then, a stupid grin on my loose lips until Jamie said “ _here_ ” with a sureness that made me turn sharply, unquestioningly, into the parking lot of an absolute dive.  Between the too-narrow lines of a parking spot, I pinched the bridge of my nose and quinted up at the sign that promised “HAPPY H0UR!!!  _2-4-1 B0TTLES 0F VIN0 FR0M 5-7_.” All of the O’s had been replaced by zeroes and a sad line offered “free wi-fi!” with a backwards “r.”
> 
> “Are you sure?”  
> 
> “C’mon… it’ll be perfect for a little booze, a little flirting, a lot of celebration,” Jamie declared with an expression that was almost garish in the way it split across his face.  His smile was a trail traversing the uncharted landscape.  A path back to the comfortable place where our relationship resided.  And this restaurant was the ground on which we would stand until we could get onto an airplane.  I touched his chin as an unexpected warmth radiated out from the center of me, into my limbs, making my fingertips feel light.  For a moment he looked like he was going to ask if something was wrong, but he stopped himself.  
> 
> His entire face had changed in the span of just a few hours.  An indescribable weight lifting from Atlas’s shoulders, the absolution of the burden of boundless celestial heavens on his shoulders. I leaned over the center console, kissed him full on the mouth, fingers winding into the baby-soft curls at the nape of his neck.  
> 
> _Relief_.   _Hope._
> 
> Jamie’s smirk said that he saw right through me, could feel my heartbeat in his blood.  
> 
> My voice would be husky, I just knew, so I stayed silent.  As still as a statue, he let me kiss the corner of his mouth and closed his eyes so I could brush my lips over his eyelids.  For a time, the dusty, dilapidated parking lot became our sanctuary, my hands winding into his shirt.  
> 
> Eventually, Jamie licked his lips and swallowed, asking, “Shitty pizza?”
> 
> “Shitty pizza,” I agreed, my voice just as husky as I had expected.
> 
> A disinterested hostess allowed us to choose our own seat, and we ended up tucked into an isolated corner booth. Red and white checked tablecloth dotted by parmesan and red pepper flake shakers, abnormally-shaped grease and wine stains. Over menus, and without so much as a glance in my direction, Jamie took my hand, his finger rubbing between my wedding ring and knuckle.  My mouth went dry, the intimacy of his touch making me feel like I was stark naked before him.
> 
> When a waiter came, my mouth stuttered over our drink order.  Jamie’s lips quirked –– wry, teasing.  That little look was enough to fuel me through a marathon of reconnection.
> 
> The realization struck me that we were strangers to normalcy, but we  _still existed_.  
> 
> And it was enough.
> 
> _We_  were enough.  We would have to fight, climbing and clawing for something to hold onto. And in the end, we would would repossess piece by piece the stolen bits of ourselves.  
> 
> A pair of greylags ordering fried artichokes that tasted like our long weekend holiday to Rome earlier in the year.  
> 
> Just two displaced birds sharing a bottle of wine with a twist top.
> 
> The lad and lass of some epic poem, nearly forgotten through centuries, connecting after an odyssey.
> 
> Eating terrible Italian food with mid-priced bottle of very dry chianti wrapped in a wicker.
> 
> It tasted like violets and cherries, tart.  A wine that would dwell on tongues and lips long after our dinner had been dispatched. The taste of it on one another’s mouths would make our faces pucker up, our laughs pass like breath between us.
> 
> _Yes._
> 
> We talked about all manner of things.
> 
> His physical therapy.  
> 
> My efforts to work remotely on a grant proposal for some research that I wanted to do.  
> 
> Photographs of Buffalo Bill that John and David had sent to me on Facebook earlier in the day. ( _Sleeping on his back with his blocky head lolling off of the couch and jowls drooping. Celia perched on his back, fists full of auburn fur and smile explosive with two candy-white teeth that neither of us had seen. Sitting regally in a pile of well-masticated trash with the glint of pride in his soppy brown eyes and velvety tongue hanging out like a rope._ )  
> 
> Which seats to book in business class for our trip home, my heart soaring as we typed the number of Jamie’s American Express into the payment verification screen.  
> 
> _Six nights._
> 
> As the airline’s confirmatory email chirped its arrival in my inbox, he swiped his lower lip with a firm thumb.  I just stared at him, closing one eye with fingers framed up like a viewfinder.  Content with my inspection, I declared, “I think you’ve gotten it.”
> 
> “No, Sassenach.  _Ye’re_ the one wi’ sauce on yer mouth… right side…”  He looked at me, eyes gone stormy over a glass of the chianti.  I blushed, wiping.  He shook his head, handing me a linen napkin that he had submerged only briefly in his glass of ice water.  “Yer  _other_  right.”
> 
> As I wiped at my mouth, I flushed pink at the way he was looking at me.  
> 
> There was a certain Jamie Fraser smolder that he periodically trotted out.  
> 
> He saved it for a few occasions.  
> 
> Talking me into agreeing to some purchase I found ridiculous ( _the matte black spaceship of a car he purchased for his birthday, the naming of the bloody dumb thing “Donas,” and then showing up with its after-market rims a few weekends later_ ).  Apologizing for something ( _the announcement one Saturday morning that he had signed us both up for a half marathon the following Sunday, but had neglected to tell me_ ). Business networking functions ( _a schmooze boasting a success rate that was almost disturbing to witness in action_ ).  Trying to get me into bed ( _a short seduction for a task that rarely proved to be difficult_ ).  
> 
> For me, the Fraser smolder never failed to make the lights around us dim and all ambient noise fade away.  
> 
> True to form, his gaze was low and blue, slanted. His lower lip rolled between his thumb and forefinger.  His intention tonight was, quite plainly,  _sex_. Heat rose along the tops of my breasts, speckled my throat, crept over my jaw, colored my cheeks, and seared my belly.
> 
> “Ye’re quite pretty when ye flush like that,” he commented, scrutinizing the plate between us and spearing another section of artichoke.  
> 
> It only made me blush harder.
> 
> We spent the next hour plotting the next day ( _a Saturday and our first day entirely free of therapy and appointments since his discharge_ ).
> 
> It was easy to settle on a loose plan.
> 
> Sleeping late.  
> 
> Sunshine.  
> 
> Swimming.  
> 
> A movie.
> 
> Testing out the new crutches.  
> 
> The whole while, I was pink, burning.
> 
> The only hiccup came when John texted me, the message bright and outlined in blue as it lit up the screen.
> 
> _Are *you* feeling any better today? How is *he* doing?_
> 
> A twilight descended on his mood as he read the message, eyes dulling.  The quiet change in him as he locked the phone, placed it face down on the table, reached inside of me and shivered down my spine.  It was a look that I would never get used to, though I had seen it a thousand times.  I fought the urge to take the phone from the center of the table, to splutter explanations, and instead concentrated on him.  
> 
> Every word in my vocabulary that could express how dear he was to me ( _how beloved_ ) converged into a harmony of sounds between my ears as our eyes met.  Carefully, I covered his hand with mine and swallowed when his fingers twitched beneath mine.  He was calling out for some piece of me.  I did not know which one ( _a tenderness, firmness, hopefulness_ ), so I was tentative when I asked, “Are you okay?”
> 
> “Aye.  Fine.”  He licked his lips and cleared his throat.  It was as though he had for the first time contemplated that John and I talked about him outside of his presence.  That there was a  _bond_ there now, independent of him.  And while it was not troubling him, per se, he was trying to process it before he put words to the feeling. “Ye were sae…  _frightened_.  I asked him to check in on ye.  I shouldna be… surprised.”
> 
> There was no sense hiding the truth, so I just nodded, whispering an acknowledgment. His fingers twitched and he turned his hand beneath mine, threading our fingers together.  
> 
> “I’ve got more scars now.”  It was a pivot, but I knew that my newly forged connection with John might just be one.  The knowledge that the strength friendship was born not of common interest, but our mutual, desperate need to have a sounding board for the threat of losing  _him_.
> 
> “Hmmm,” I intoned, insinuating my fingers between his and lifting his hand, drawing it across the table to my mouth.  
> 
> I had committed to memory the haunting stairway of the new pink marks lining his fingers nights earlier.  Just as I had years earlier memorized the other carvings on him.  The torn, scored flesh on his back. The curl of a scar where his thigh had been hemmed back together after what had happened in Afghanistan. The ridged purple mark on his ribs.  Unable to sleep in the too-cold bungalow, my eyes had fixed on the new marks adorning his fingers and hands.  Somehow, knowing them felt like making good on a debt that I owed him by virtue of loving him.  
> 
> The debt of knowing his body as well as I knew my own.
> 
> I kissed the blank space where his wedding band had rested before being cut off by his medical team ( _the crushed, dislocated pieces of his joints and fingers presenting an inhospitable environment in which to slip it free for preservation_ ).  
> 
> “Your scars are part of a collection,” I whispered.  “ _My_  collection. Remember? You pick up the scars, you dwell under the blade of grass, and I bring you back.  And you do the same for me.  Again and again.”
> 
>  

 


	20. Part Twenty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NSFW.

##  **Loss (Act II)  
** **Part Twenty**

We toasted to  _six more nights_ , eyes holding onto one another over the table.

Between the bottom of our first glass of wine and our dessert, I slipped one foot out of my sandal and quested for his uninjured leg.  

“What’re ye doin’?” he asked, voice darkening to opaque black with eyes settled on me.

“Truth or dare?”

He snorted, an index finger running lazily up and down the stem of his wine glass.  “Really?”

“ _Really_.”  His gaze shifted just slightly to incredulity.  “You started it, and I’m merely resurrecting it.”

“ _Truth_ , then.”

“How many girls have you kissed?”

“ _Lame_ ,” he snorted.  

Eyebrows raised, I gave a small shrug and indicated with my hand for him to get on with it.  

“Och, weel… I was an athlete, Claire––”

“Oh good.  I’m in for some male self-aggrandizement.”  I smirked, emptying the wine bottle between our glasses.  

He gave me a scandalized look, eyes casting around my face before saying, “Annaliese,  _of course_ ––”

“ _Of course_ ,” I echoed with a laugh, taking the wine that had long gone room temperature into my mouth.  

( _The blonde, pert-breasted thing of his youthful fantasies.  The girl who claimed virginity his virginity and who he pined over throughout his teenage years.  The woman who was no less beautiful or sweet at Jamie’s fifteen-year reunion, but had been decisively same-sex oriented when I met her._ )

“I asked for a  _number_ , Fraser.  _Not_  an alphabetical list.”

He raised an eyebrow, tilting his head as he caught my bare ankle with the arch of his foot. “Kind of a lukewarm waste of a question then, don’t ye think, Sassenach?”  I huffed.  “A dozen or so, I’d suppose.”

I couldn’t help my eyes rolling, my limbs flexing, my head apportioning words into neat, venomous packages.  But then, his hand brushed my forearm and came to rest over my wrist.

“Ye werena the first lass I kissed, but I swear to ye that ye’ll be the last, Claire.”

I caught the edge of the table, a bit off kilter between the tympanic rumblings of my heart, reverberating off of each bit of anatomy in my chest. He did not say anything if he noticed the change in me.  Per usual, I wondered if he knew precisely the effect that he had on me when he said things like that.

“Truth or dare?” he asked when I remained silent.

 _Truth_ , of course.

From there, our game unraveled while the entire world dissolved.

A lifeless planet but for us.

No more rotations on its axis.

No more revolutions around the sun.  

Nothing remained.  

No bills or deadlines to be missed at work.  

No physical therapy appointments to attend or pill boxes with a colorful assortment of medications to fill slots for Monday through Friday.

No refrigerator drawers needing to be wiped clean or laundry to be folded.  

It was not even a question when the waiter asked if we were ready for the check.  

Without consulting Jamie, I ordered a second bottle of wine and another freezer-burnt serving of tiramisu.

We savored each other as much as the meal before us.  We had not been separate, but it was like through the dumb game he had devised early in our relationship, we began to construct bridges back to one another.

The questions started benign.

The worst thing either of us had ever done. ( _Mine was mixing dog food with cereal mix at a faculty Christmas party that Lamb took me to the first year after my parents passed away. I confessed to watching, with an almost pathological disinterest, as one of Lamb’s colleagues ate it by the handful.  Jamie’s was apprehension by a shop clerk for filching a Playboy from a convenience store when he visiting New York with his father. He reported that his arse stung for a week from the wallopping._ )

The weirdest dream that I had ever had about him, which left him so distraught ( _disgusted grimace, head shaking_ ) that he just said “ _truth_ ” instead of commenting.  ( _I was pregnant and gave birth to a kitten, but I was the only one who realized it was strange.  In the dream, Jamie had dressed the kitten in little overalls and fed it warm bottles of formula._ )

But as the waiter set down a tall serving of tiramisu so covered in cinnamon that I could sense the grit on my teeth, I pivoted a little at his request for truth.

“Tell me your biggest fantasy.”  My tone was regulated, sexy.  The ask made my chest puff out, but inside, I was doing an Olympic backstroke in a pool of uneasiness.  

He cut a corner off of the tiramisu, dragging it through the dusting of ornamental cinnamon along the rim of the plate.  When he looked up, I thought that my insides would liquefy.  “I’m marrit to it.”

“ _Stop_.” I took the fork from his hand, taking his perfect bite with a smile.  With a mouth rolling with cream and cake, I said, “Tell me.”

“This, right here?” He took the fork back, rolling his eyes. “ _This_  is what I have to fantasize about. A real dream come true –– my curly-heided lass and her need to bogart my dessert.”

Shrugging, I pointed out the obvious. “You can have fantasies about someone else, you know.  I won’t be offended.”

“Claire, I will never forget the moment that I kissed ye the first time.”  His volume dropped, though the intensity of his voice was like a tightened screw, the threads about to be stripped from being cranked too tight. He had a face to match, eyes gleaming through the shadow of his brows as he tilted his head forward with a transparent intention ( _make me swoon, throw me off further_ ). “I remember every moment, every second.  Standin’ there, tucked away in the dark… I’ll never forget the moment ye stepped towards me.  It was as if I stepped outside on a cloudy day.  And suddenly the  _sun_  came out.”

I reached for my wine and attempted to swallow the lump in my throat with not an insignificant mouthful.  I failed.  The lump grew.  He smiled, touched my hand for the sparsest of moments before taking a breadstick from the basket between us.  

“Weel, that’s all tae say that I dinna have fantasies about anyone other than my wife, as awful as she is.”  At his change of tack, I raised an eyebrow as he offered me a second bite.  I took it, chewing thoughtfully, studying him as he engaged in the apparently academic exercise of putting to words a response to my inquiry.  “Okay… I visited this thing when I was just a lad.  An old farm with a butter churn––”

“ _Wait_.” I held up a hand, swallowing and wiping at my mouth with a napkin.  “Your fantasy involves a field trip you took when you were a kid and  _a butter churn_? Do I need to specify  _sexual_  fantasy? Because I’m trying to change the tone of the game, Jamie, and you’re––”

“Christ,  _a nighean_ ,” he grumbled, this time taking a bite for himself.  “Would ye let me finish? I’ll get to the part ye’re sae interested in… I’m just scene setting.”

Holding an imaginary key with my fingers, I locked my lips.  In graphic detail he recounted something so filthy that it made my mouth go dry.  

“Truth or dare?” he concluded with a smirk.

With a voice that matched the trembling in my hands, I requested  _truth_  with dry lips.

“Tell me about yer panties.”

“ _Wot_?” I asked, the emphasis morphing my accent.

“Ye heard me good and god damned well, Claire.”  

_Oh God he was enjoying himself.  Well, so would I…_

“What makes you think that I’m wearing any?”

At this, he snorted into his wine glass, shrugging.  “Just that when ye bent to pick up all of yer scattered shite, I saw them under yer skirt.”

“Well then you’re wasting a question because it seems that you’ve already taken stock of what is happening––”

–– I pointed down below the booth, tilting my head ––

“–– _down here_.”

“Och, weel, it wasna more than a second––”

“Black.  Cotton.  Bikini brief.  With thick elastic.  The cheap stuff that come rolled up in a plastic bag of four.”

“Hm.  My favorite.”

I snorted, raising my hand for the check.  “Truth or dare?”

Leaning forward, Jamie exhaled through his nose as his finger drew a circuit around the lip of his glass.  “Truth.”

“What is the most public place you’ve had sex?”

“Wi’ you?” he asked with a put upon naivete that made me roll my eyes.

I drained the last of my wine before answering.  “I’ve  _been there_  for everything with me.   _Other_ than me.”

Though I could see an apparent flicker of awareness on his face ( _a realization that he was about to tread on dangerous ground_ ), he answered anyway.  “Under the bleachers at school, I lost my virginity to Annalie-–”

“For  _Christ’s sake_ , how many times will she come up tonight?”  Though I wasn’t jealous of her ( _what was there to be jealous of, really?_ ), I  _was_  annoyed at my own question.

“ _You asked_.”

“ _I know_ ,” I hissed, looking mournfully into my empty glass. “And I shouldn’t have asked.”

He smirked, releasing a frustrated sigh that implied, loud and clear, a phrase he rarely said ––  _I told ye so_.  It was well deserved, but I turned up my nose.  “I’m limiting myself then.  To  _you_.  There was that night we went to see Hamilton and during the intermission––”

My demand that he “ _stop right fucking now James Fraser_ ” was met with a laugh so hearty that I wondered if his battered ribs ached.  

It was time to pivot off of my poor choice of question, so I trilled, “My turn.  Dare.”

My request was met with a long stare before he leaned across the table towards me, taking his credit card from the leather portfolio.  “Take yer panties off and touch yerself.”

“James Fraser,” I muttered for the second time in under a minute, insides curdling and mind positively melting.  The chuckle that came from him, his hand scrawling a tip and signature on the credit card slip, only made me flushed deeper.  “You bloody Scot.”

“Are ye a chicken?” he asked, popping one of the peppermint candies that the waiter had left with the check between his lips.

With an indignant snort, I grabbed the car keys from the end of the table, and shook my head as I slipped out of the booth.  “I’m rather offended. That’s two dares in a single request. First the panties.  Then the touching. And is  _well_ outside the rules established for the game.  You’re unfair.”

“I’d hate for ye to think I’m takin’ advantage of ye.”   _It was precisely what he was doing.  The quiet, patented art of his seduction working as well as it ever had_.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I huffed, grabbing and offering him his crutches.

He got himself onto his feet, situated himself with hands on each handgrip, and managed a two stride head start on me.  When looked at me over his shoulder and said, “ _oh yeah?_ ” with a lazy sexiness, I could have replaced  _that night when we saw Hamilton_  with  _seedy California Italian restaurant_.

I floated to the restroom on a too-sweet marshmallow cloud of bliss.  After studying myself in the mirror, I decided that I could be the type of wife who scuttled her knickers on her husband’s dare.  With my panties shoved deep into the pocket of my skirt, I made my way out to him as my chest colored itself crimson just from knowing.

In the dim light of the parking lot, I climbed into the driver’s seat turned to him.  “I hate you sometimes,” I commented.  

 _Nothing could be further from the truth.  I was burning from him (_ ** _for_** _him), surrendering to his plot with an ulterior motive_.

Eyes alight and mouth smug, he was like an athlete who has crossed a finish line  _just knowing_ that he’s won the gold. There was a feigned note of curiosity when he ecked out “ _do ye now?_ ” in a low burr.  Then, reaching out to trace the curve of one of my shoulders, his face transformed. His attention was singular on the simple act of feeling me, focusing on my skin.  I was all that existed in the moment.  

_No pain.  No crutches.  Not the fact that we were thousands of miles from home._

And with that, I shoved my utilitarian black knickers into his hand.

His attention shifted as he felt the fabric.  After a moment, cackling, he set about folding them into a neat square. In response for the testosterone-infused show, I pinched him on one of the few square inches of flesh I knew that the fall had left untouched.  He yelped, whining out an exaggerated “ _ow_ ” as he laughed.  I smirked, putting the car into drive.

Back at the bungalow, locked away for the night, we prepared for bed with the first silence of the evening. It was pulled up over us like a warm blanket.  A routine of brushing teeth and dressing for sleep that felt utterly unremarkable.  Perfect in its ordinariness.

Teeth brushed, and about to slip into pajamas, I dropped an earring back.  Searching the floor for it, bent at the waist, Jamie’s first touch since arriving back to the bungalow landed. Just above the crease of my knee. It made me jump. Broad and sure, his palm roved north under the hemline of my skirt from his seat on the edge of the bed.  

A first step in a dance, the path his hand took becoming golden.

“Ye’ve got a suntan,” he commented, voice gruff.  “And freckles along the bridge of yer nose.  Noticed them while ye were giggling at dinner. They make ye look sae beautiful when ye blush.”

As I returned to my full height, his hand held steady and slid further into my skirt, coming to rest on the curve of my bare left buttock. My stomach clenched at the shine in his eyes and the quick darting of his tongue, wetting his lips on a ragged inhale.  “Ye fulfilled only half of yer two-part dare…”

“Jamie–” I started as his hand kneaded into my flesh, a possession my body welcomed with an almost embarrassing enthusiasm.

“Come here for a second.”

He caught my forearm with his free hand, drawing my fingertips to his mouth. Our shadows blended as I stepped between his spread knees, the meeting of our innocent parts ( _knees, calves_ ) making liquid heat streak down my spine, turn to a whirlpool my belly, and settle low in my pelvis.

We stared at each other for what felt like only moments and an eternity at the same time.  

Instinct made me lift a foot, stroke down the bow and arrow curve of his shin.  

I touched his arm, marveling for a moment at how small my hand looked there even though the bulk of him had decreased slightly over the last weeks.

 _Quiet_.  

Nowhere to be.  No one to call.  No dog to let out for one last piss before bed.  No appointments in the morning.

Just Jamie.  Just me.

I had hope, feeling myself rouse at the prospect of this, but unwilling to speak it into existence between us, to be told “ _not tonight_ ” even once more.

As I thought better of my silence, resolving myself to crawl into bed and sleep, he reached out to touch the outside swell of my breast. His tongue darted out to wet his lips and my breath hitched, expectant at the intention brewing in his eyes and a little discomfited by the apprehension in his movements.

His healed fingers felt different than they had before.  

Not the shape or breadth of them.  

They had the tentativeness like a man who had never touched a woman before, had never touched  _me_  before.

But then, his hand curved around me through my shirt, experimenting with the weight of my breast and pinching too gently.

In a voice no more than a whisper, he admitted, “I want to try to make love to ye, Claire.”

Every nerve in my body took notice of the words, the icy exoskeleton that had formed over me at John’s phone call all those insufferably long days earlier melted. Sensation returned to me.  _Everywhere._ It was almost as if I had forgotten what it meant to be desired by him, to have the prospect of joining so within reach.

It had been thirty-four days since he had, with unreserved abandon, bent me over the desk in my office, both of us a little worse for drink and rough with each other.  ( _Declarations that made me blush like a virgin.  Begging him to fuck me harder, faster.  A spank that exploded deliciously loud within the four walls of my office.  The keening noise I’d made that made him laugh, hand pressing into my lower back. The pleasant sting of his touch spreading everywhere as I pushed my hips back against him.  Expressions of love as he caressed the pinkening area on my buttocks._ )

This would be different than that night, I knew.

Since the beginning of our relationship we had grounded ourselves in being together physically.

Bodies snapping together like magnets with a need.  Soothing arguments over trivial matters with whispered capitulations to this or that.  Releasing tension after long days. Searching for comfort and light in darkness.  

This, too, would be something new.

A reclaiming of his soul ( _and perhaps some of mine, too_ ), a reacclimation of familiar but distant bodies intent on writing the ending to a devastating chapter of our life together.

It had been thirty-two days since the desert had attempted to claim him for keeps.  

My limbs were flooded by a sudden gratitude for him.  His continued existence, the look in his eyes, that we had another chance, that someday ( _not now, but later_ ) we would be just fine again.

“Would ye mind very much––”

“No. I… let’s try… I…” Merely the idea of being with him felt like a string in my spine, drawing me to attention.  I unconsciously arched towards him at the mere prospect.

“I dinna ken…” his voice trailed off. He sighed, eyes flickering up to my face.  His thumb ran over fabric and the crest of my puckered nipple.

My voice was hoarse when I whispered, “What is it?”

“It’s been… sae long.”  His voice cracked and his face narrowed as he drew his right cheek between his teeth, chewing.  I touched his face, willing him to release the flesh before blood flooded his mouth.  He relaxed, but only slightly.

“A month,” I mumbled, shifting close enough that our breath mingled in the space between us. “And four days.”

“But ye’ve no’ been counting, aye?”

Smiling faintly, shaking my head as I leaned into him, pressing my breast fully into his hand. “Of  _course_  I have not been counting.”

“Ye bloody wee liar.” His eyes shone ( _tears or the glow of affection, maybe both_ ) as his thumb and forefinger tugged on my nipple, drawing a small whimper from my lips. “I’m no’ sure if…  _well_ ….”

I knew without asking his concern.  I had not felt him hard against me as we woke on any of the mornings since we had started to share a bed again.  When he had touched me that first night, he had been soft under my palm, apologetic and broken.

Carefully, I threaded a hand into his hair. He looked saintly in back glow of the bedroom –– hard in the right places, reverent eyes, parted lips.

In the moment, his body seemed like a forgotten thing to me.  

I skated a hand down the front of his shirt to rest just above the elastic waistband at his hips.  Taking a fortifying breath, I decided to embody Dr. Beauchamp-Fraser for just a moment. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sassenach, ye ken that ye can ask me anything.” His voice caught on the words, eyes warming ever-so-slightly in an apparent recognition of my shift. “I’ve always been an open book to ye.”

I gently ran a palm over the barely-visible arousal insistently tenting itself against his boxers, looking at him through hooded eyes. “You’ve had an erection since the accident, right? And been able to maintain one?”

“Aye, I’ve been hard since…  _it_  happened. But…” His voice trailed off as he looked down between us, voice a little abashed. My attention followed his gaze down. The extent of his arousal was promising, though he looked like he was free floating a thousand miles away. “I havena… Christ.”

“What?”

He cleared his throat, but stayed silent as his left thumb ceased its absent-minded back and forth tease.

“You can tell me anything.” When he didn’t speak, I added, “We’re mated for life, after all. Like those geese or hens or  _whatever_  bird it was you told me about.”

My comment earned only a brief, humorless snort. “ _Greylags_. And I was goin’ to say… I havena even touched myself…  _since then_. It’s like there’s no’ been a  _wanting_  in me. I mean, I want ye, I just… It’s only been in the few days or so that I’ve thought that we should try. It’s no’  _you_ , it’s _––_ ”

“Stop,” I said firmly, reaching for his face and running my thumb over the expanse of his lower lip to seal a bond that had never truly broken. “That is not something I would ever even think to consider under the circumstances.  That you don’t want me.”

He did not speak right away.  I licked my lips, swallowing hard.

“It’s just that I dinna want to hurt yer feelings if I canna….  _perform_.  It’s no’  _you_.”

“Quit saying that.”

“I love ye, I love taking yer body, I just…”

Though he appeared unashamed at the admission, vulnerability tempered his movements. Stark naked pain was painted right into the fathomless blue of his eyes.

I did not know how to begin to explain to him that the mere  _idea_  of physical intimacy made me feel closer to him. It was as if by reclaiming that singular, elemental thing between us we were going to champion over this entire ordeal and prove that he truly was  _okay_.

“First, I have no  _expectations_  for what will happen. I just want to be close to you, in whatever way that I can.” I searched his eyes, hoping to excavate some showing that he understood.

He made a wholly unconvinced sound from deep in his chest.

“Second, it won’t hurt my feelings,” I said candidly, my hand covering his on my breast.  _And it was true_.With a smile, I squeezed his fingers.

His free hand rose to rest along the curve of my waist.  As carefully as I could, I smoothed the rut between his brows away as he commenced a tender inspection of my body. From the look of concentration, the slowness of his touch, it was almost as if he was memorizing the shape of me anew.

“A body does what a body does. You’re still putting everything back together where it belongs. It takes time. We can ease back into this slowly. Sex doesn’t have to be penetrative… we can––”

“No, mo nighean donn,” he said firmly, shaking his head. “ _Mo chridhe.  My brown lass, my heart_.”

 _A pause, a breath, a fire lighting in his eyes_.  

“Come to me. Cover me.  Shelter me.  A bhean, heal me. Burn with me, as I burn for you.”

At his words, my brain, chest, belly, thighs, and core all separated into disembodied hemispheres for his exploration.  I had the sudden, aching realization that the lyrics he was writing for the moment alone were capable of pulling me apart along the centerline.  He was inviting me to feel wanted by him in the basest and yet most complicated ways.If even for a few moments, he was asking for me to give myself so that he could find his way back.

I tilted my head to the side, sighing as his hand worked beneath the hem of my top, finding flesh.

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself trying to do something if you’re not ready––”

“ _I’m ready_ ,” he interrupted somewhat forcefully. It was as though he had been waiting for the right moment and nothing would dissuade him from executing whatever plan he had.  “I… I’m going to… touch ye.  Okay?”

I nodded just a bit, my heart pulling at the seams at his hesitancy, the way he waited for permission. My belly ached with the need to have his fingers rediscover the hidden parts of me, to relearn his touch. Slowly, he caressed the skin beneath my navel before continuing his investigations lower. Easing his fingers between my thighs, I felt my pulse hammering beneath the thin skin of my wrists.

“Christ,” he ground out, biting down on his lower lip as he cupped me. “Ye’re completely bare.”

I responded plainly, with a short nod. It was a fact. “Yes.”

“Did ye think that we would…?”  _A swallow, a breath, a look, and his whispered question_. “Did ye think we’d try? I mean, ye’re no’ running around bare for the thrill of it.”

“I had hoped.”  It was an honest appraisal of what had been running through my mind as I had lathered myself with shaving cream and taken the razor to the space between my legs the morning before.

“Take this off,” he mumbled, tugging at my shirt before moving backwards onto the bed, resting his back against the headboard.

With little ceremony, I shed the top, and peremptorily dropped my skirt to the floor.  There was no pretense as I slipped my hand between my thighs, sighing slightly.

“Are ye tryin’ to kill me?”

“You called me a ‘ _chicken_ ’ for not following through… I thought you would appreciate it.”

I smirked at the quiet grunt of his approval, leaning forward and straddling him as I guided his hand to the space where mine had just been. The mere introduction of the familiar friction ( _knuckles, the length of his fingers, the heel of his hand_ ) was a bright, light, easy magic. He dragged a knuckle  _just right_  and my eyes betrayed me, cinching tight as I wrapped my fingers in his t-shirt. situating my legs carefully so as not to graze his.

“I’ve missed you.  _This_.”

He groaned a little, either from my admission or from the feeling of me. I didn’t care enough to identify the source of that sound. The breathy admission that came next wiped the slate of my brain completely clear: “ _Ye feel so good_. Warm. Smooth. Wet.  _Ready_.”

“What is it you called my vagina the last time that I took everything off?”

He shook his head, his fingers stilling over me.  “Claire, are ye deliberately tryin’ to ruin the mood?”

I knew precisely what he had said, but I wanted to hear him  _laugh_ , to bring him all the way back to me.  To fill the hollow, empty spaces that this desert had created.

“What was it? Honey… god… honey  _something_ –”

“ _Honeypot_ ,” he completed, the faintest ruddy touch of blush coloring the tips of his ears.

“That’s it,” I mumbled leaning forward and catching his lips with mine. The flat of his tongue was an unmannered thing, his fingers tentacles drawing me closer and closer by the back of my neck.

_Quick, insistent, breath stealing._

He smiled when we broke apart, explaining that had head been drunk.  A mumbled retort of disbelief against his mouth, our teeth bumping together and laughter making us ragged.

The silence that fell, sucking the breath from our laughter made way my groan. One long finger slipped inside and notched against the spot he’d mapped out long before. “Come closer.”

A second finger, curving to beckon me to  _come hither_.

A breathy stream of curse words as he replicated the motion.  I shifted nearer.  He stopped as I started to reach for his shoulders, a sudden panic consuming me. It cast the shadows of arousal out of every part of me, setting me firmly back in the reality of our situation. “I… your leg…”

Without warning, I understood acutely the reticence of every patient and spouse of a patient who bashfully brought up sex during post-op follow-ups.

The idea of hurting him made my blood run cold.

“If you’re not comfortable having  _sex_  sex… I can, I don’t know… oral––”

“Claire…” His fingers slipped free of me and he brought his hand around to curve my bottom, to draw me closer. “I said that I want to make love to my wife. Will ye let me?”

My mouth went dry.

The need to dissolve the space between us was akin to the need for oxygen. We had long before disposed of any pretense in our sex life.  There was no such thing as vulgarity when it came to expressing need ( _or,_   _perhaps sometimes more importantly, want_ ).  Being together –– the emotional high of joining, indulging in something shared between us alone, reveling in bliss –– was as earthborn as our hearts continuing to beat.  Nonetheless, I blushed as I whispered, “I want you inside of me so badly that I could cry, Jamie.”

“ _A nighean_ ,” he began, voice hitching as he touched my stomach, damp fingers leaving a sloppy trail over my skin.  A breath, a beat, a sigh. I pulled myself off of him, my belly lamenting the loss of the pressure of his fingers and trembling from the want coursing through me.

We worked in tandem –– a mechanical arranging of limbs ( _a pained hiss bitten off by my mouth, his fingers raking down my spine as I leaned over him_ ), assembly of pillows ( _support for his injured leg, behind his back_ ), the search through my purse for the box of condoms that had traveled across the waiting room floor.

In the end of all things, I sat at the end of the bed, naked with feet tucked beneath me and a single, foil-wrapped condom in my hand. It was hardly the most romantic situation –– a bedside table filled with translucent orange prescription bottles, the puckered gash of a scar from the surgery on his leg, the crutches leaning against the wall.  But it somehow had become the most perfect tableau.

His face was an unreadable mess of emotions as he fought his way into a half-sitting position, whispering, “Look at yerself. Christ.”

The width of my lower lip between my teeth, I bit hard.  

He shook his head as I leaned forward.  I crossed my arms over my breasts as I asked, “What is it?”  

I was not self conscious, but goosebumps erupted along my forearms, the words resonating from synapse to synapse.

“Ye’re my lass. My bonny wife. I canna look at ye?”

I could have cried as I carefully crawled up the length of the bed, settling on my knees next to him. “Of  _course_  you can look at me.”

His hand traveled from my knee to my hip.

“You can  _have_  me.”

His touched curved on my hip until he splayed an open hand across my lower back.  I took his free hand, brought it up to rest at the center of my chest.  ‘ _Feel my racing heart_ ,’ I wanted to say, but I could see that he already felt it everywhere.

“I’ve told you… whenever,  _however_  you want me.”

Far from the sanctity of our home bedroom, we were about to come together again.  

Any hint of joking had gone from his eyes.

My hands were those of a surgeon -–  _careful, calculating_  –– as I slid his boxers off. His cock bobbed free, insistent, but not quite ready. I concentrated on kissing the line of his throat as he mumbled to himself, fist working furiously.

“Fuck,” he mumbled after a few moments, desperation yellowing the edges of his voice like newsprint left too long in the sun. “ _This_  is what I was worried about.  _Fuck_.”

“ _Hey_.”  I covered his hand with mine, running a finger over his knuckles. “Stop. Mind if I try?”

Bare adoration looked back at me.  The individual hairs on my arm stood at attention. Shaking his head, he moved my hair out of my face before looking down between our bodies.

Breathless, I leaned forward without preamble took him into my mouth, one hand staying on his at the base and the other becoming a web to capture eight-legged demons dwelling in his mind.

I concentrated on the taste of him ––  _raw, masculine, salted flesh_  ––and hardly heard the mumble of my name, barely felt him brushing the same bit of hair off of my cheek again and again.  

Moments later, he was harder, thicker on my tongue. I pulled back, making an exaggerated popping sound with my lips.  The state of him gave me no small amount of pride as I ran my hand over his length once, twice, three times.

“You needed a woman’s touch,” I whispered.

“ _Your_ touch,” he clarified after a moment.  My heart skipped only a single beat as I made quick work of protecting ourselves. It was as though he did not notice, his attention existing solely on continuing to worry the same bundle of unruly curls.  Hands pressed into my lower back, he guided me until I was straddling him again.  The center of the universe churned in my belly and existed below me in the soft brush of him against my belly, hoping for a rebirth. “Shall we?”

A droning throb had taken up residence in the deepest recesses of me. An uncomfortable need for completion.  At his words, the sensation tore up my spine and grew into an invasive species that wound its way around my heart, my ribs, my sternum, my throat.

“Stop me if you hurt.” I choked on that, the final directive.  I stilled and pressed my fingers firmly over his mouth, trapping the responsive disregard ( _a dismissive, rusty laugh_ ) there.  I leveled him the most severe look I could muster through the haze of my arousal. “I’m  _serious_. I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt you.”

“ _Okay_.  I’ll say something,” he swore, lazily sucking my fingers into his mouth. I went almost queasy with need at his hum of appreciation ( _the taste of me probably still on my own hand_ ) and the way he grated his teeth down my finger ––  _one knuckle, the second, the fingertip_.

A chaste kiss.  

My hand on the angle of his jaw.

A request for permission ( _“ready?” asked as much for my benefit as his_ ).

Nodded assent.

Finally ––

“Guide yourself inside of me as I lower my hips?”

The turn of his lips pulled back the curtain on a side of him that had been missing since that night in my office.  “Aye, Claire. Even though I’m still right fucked, I ken how to have sex wi’ my wife…”

Smiling self-consciously, I nodded, giving his face one last gentle stroke before gripping the headboard.

“Angle yer hips… forward just a little…”

I tilted slightly, dipping my hips. The space between my breasts absorbed a hissed exhalation ( _a swear word, a Scottish noise, his eyes going wide before cinching shut_ ) as the the tip of him found home. A jolt of tension rippled up my spine, abating at the base of my skull, as his knuckles brushed against me.

My question (“ _okay_?”) met its twin ( _“okay_ ”) as I lowered myself over him.

Everything hollowed out –– my belly, my brain, my chest.

For the briefest of moments, I noted the tautness in his muscles and the exquisite showing of pain mixing with pleasure on his face.  Goosebumps exploded across my forearms, down my spine, along the center of my torso when we were completely joined.  I stilled, fighting the urge to thank God again and again, effusive and with a sudden spirituality that had not dwelled in me since before I met Jamie.

“I’m going to…” I started, feeling the briny prickle of tears in my eyes. ‘ _Return to me_ ,’ my mind urged him. My fingers curled harder into the headboard, the slight stretch of him a completion of a half-written story after months of separation. It took my breath away.

Another question (“ _move_?”) met by a ragged imitation ( _“move, aye,” followed by an expletive and “a nighean_ ”).

I did, breath hitching when his hand moved to rest just below my navel.

Another string of expletives poured from him as I lowered myself again.

It was like our first time. Learning how he felt inside of me. The sensation of his fingertips sinking into my hips as he drew me down over him, lifted me. How we moved together.  

We were green.  _Budding_.

“Tell me how it feels,” he grumbled, hips moving up only slightly to meet the downstroke.

I did tell him.  

_Full._

_Complete._

A description met by breathy a “ _yes_ ” and something dangerously close to “ _fuck_.”

I was pink in the cheeks, almost mindless with the need to go  _harder_ ,  _faster_ , to claim more exquisitely what was mine.

Voice fading, I couldn’t speak with his thumb tracing an infinity between my legs.

The bungalow ceased to have sound –– the rush of water in the washing machine, the settling creak of the bones of the architecture, the gentle white noise whir of the fan I insisted be on when we slept, the hum of the dishwasher all fell silent.  

All that was left was the sound of his breath, hitching and releasing and hitching and releasing over and over again.

Coherent thought left me in the silver stream of a low moan.

The milky expanse of our galaxy ceased to exist as my eyes closed.

The scraps of our remaining world were small enough to dwell on the head of a pin, but what  _did_ remain existed  _everywhere_ , all at once.

Bursts of lights flashed along the seam of my eyelids.  I was matching his every breath. Each time I rose and sank over him, we somehow became young together.  The moments of the preceding weeks fading, turning to dust at the connection of our flesh.  

 _Blood of my blood.  Bone of my bone_.

“I dinna ken how long I can… it’s been like…  _two minutes_.   _Fuck_.”

One hand fell from the headboard to curve along his cheek. “It’s fine. Let go.”

Somewhere in the moment, lost and wandering in the realization that my husband was inside of me, I started to cry in the leaking, uncontrollable joy kind of way.  I vaguely recognized the difference in grip strength between his hands ( _injured versus uninjured_ ) as I rose again, but the realization puddled to an incomprehensible nothingness as I sank back over him.

I knew his body, as battered and broken as it had been, was healing in places unseen by the naked eye.

Somehow, he knew my wounds, too.

“Claire, we need to stop––”

Without even a moment’s delay, I lifted off of him, thighs quivering as I hovered. Panic flared redhot from my fingertips as instinct compelled me to reach for the hand he had injured. It was resting flat over my hip, his fingers pressing into my stomach.

“Did I hurt––”

“––no, it’s––”

“Hand? Leg––”

“–– _no_ , I––”

“Jamie, I’m sorr––”

“ _Claire_ ,” he said firmly, his voice a little gruff. “You havena hurt me. It’s just… I’m…”

A flush of embarrassment colored his already-pinked cheeks as he looked down, eyes half closed, to where I was suspended over him.

A little breathless, he said, “This is going to be over if ye dinna slow it down.”

“Is that a problem?” My words were glazed, syrupy slow. I placed one hand on the center of his chest, feeling an appreciation for the divinity of a heartbeat capable of tapping a furious rhythm beneath my fingers.

_That bloody heart, the one that had stopped, was unrestrained as it animated his limbs._

_He was wholly alive._

**_We_ ** _were wholly alive._

“Ye’re nowhere near done…” His voice was far away, catching. “I want ye to enjoy this.”

As carefully as possible, and attempting to keep myself from inadvertently putting pressure on his leg, I leaned forward to kiss him. I drew his hand up to rest between my breasts.  “Feel that?” I rasped. He nodded, fingers trembling for only a moment before stilling. “I’m enjoying the ride. Literally. Now quit  _warning me_  that you’re going to come and just do it.”

My eyes not leaving his, I guided him back inside of me. The maneuver earned another muttered “ _fuck_ ” and what I assumed were Gaelic stand-ins for the same word.

I was glowing.

Roughly four minutes after we started to make love, Jamie finished with a groaning, aching declaration of devotion, pulling me down as he surged up. With the utmost attention to our limbs, I maneuvered myself onto my side next to him and slipped the condom off of him. I was woozy, drunk on the still-building, unfulfilled feeling brewing in my belly. The sensation had just started to fade, along with my consciousness, when I felt a hand slip between my thighs. He whispered, “Lift yer knee for me,  _mo chridhe_.”

Staring at him, my hand on his chest, I did, having never felt so close to another person.

He adjusted just enough that some of his weight bore down upon me.  When I split apart, the heavy weight of his thigh holding me to the mattress, I had never known a world so infinite, so alive and yet so still.  

We had been shipwrecked, but were coming ashore in a land that was entirely new.


	21. Part Twenty-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last night in California.

##  **Loss (Act II)  
** **Part Twenty-One**

_One more night in California_.

A single sunrise and a discrete list of chores separated us from our departure.  A night of packing, laundry, binning unneeded and unwanted things, tidying the lived-in places of the bungalow, and polishing off half-finished bottles of semi-stale red wine.  

Before turning in for the night, we would set an alarm even though our bodies were clocks and compasses primed to gravitate towards home at the earliest possible opportunity.

In twenty-four hours, I would be home.

 _We would be home_.

In five days, I would be right back in the thick of things at work.  

_Seeing patients.  Surgeries.  Shifts on call.  Participating in the administration of the department as a shadow to my mentor._

Curled up with my back on the couch and my laptop perched on my stomach, I finalized via email the details of my return as Jamie’s fingers attempted to wheedle their way into my waistband. The metronome of his peppermint-sweet breath ticked a perfect  _inhale-exhale-inhale_ rhythm against on my skin.

Within that perfect pattern existed a well of his temperance and restraint, my well for the same having readily run dry.  “Stop,” I mumbled, adjusting my computer and twisting my hips away from him.  “I need to get these few things wrapped up before we go.  It’s like my entire practice falls apart when I’m not there.”

He hummed a discontented noise, moving his digits to march as perfectly rebellious soldiers along the inseam of my jeans. I watched the procession with no small amount of interest.  ( _The scar on his middle finger had faded from an angry red to an undefined purple.  Soon it would be pink, then silver. Eventually it would be visible only to the two of us._ )  The calvary advanced north and I gave myself to the featherlight sensation for a moment, my heart rate quickening and throat parching.

“One final bungalow romp?” he asked, voice soft and eyes heavy lidded as his hand cupped me.  The intravenous drip of arousal multiplied in my blood. My thighs trembled. Unspeakable needed made my chest leaden.  “Do ye want me to stop?”

‘ _No, no, no, no_ ,’ my mind caterwauled in response ( _the part that had long ago cast the role of Romantic Lead as Claire Beauchamp-Fraser, plucky surgeon who puddle at the Dashing Scot_ ).  Another part of me started  _tut-tut-tutting_  ( _the other part of me –– a schoolmarm with an iron chastity belt and sense enough to protect rapidly diminishing time to accomplish the hundred little tasks yet to be done_ ).  “No, but  _yes_.”

Immediately, he withdrew his hands, flopped backwards into the couch, and crossed his arms over his belly.  “It’s no’ a Sunday funday wi’out a wee bit of play… getting all caught up for the week.  Do ye no’ remember our  _traditions_?”

I typed a furious finish to my email and snapped my laptop shut.  He was not  _wrong_  about Sundays. Our Sunday routine roughly five months after our wedding had a cartographers’ precision and the ready, needy physicality of newlyweds.  ( _Coffee.  Groceries.  Sex.  Reading.  Cooking.  Usually more sex._ )

Then the bloody Scot had the gall to  _wink at me_.   _As if it would change a damned thing_.

“You’re  _incorrigible_ , you know that?”

He glanced down at his lap, and tilted his head.  “I’m  _something_ now that ye’re leaving me hanging wi’ half of a cockstand.”

I rolled my eyes, raking my hair back and gathering it in a sloppy bun atop my head.  “There’s at least a metric ton of  _shit_  that needs sorting, and I will  _not_  pack dirty clothes.  I want to be able to just unpack when we get home and forget that this ever happened.”

He huffed out a long, petulant breath, a stray hand stroking a sliver of tan stomach.  “No one wants to forget this as much as me.”  

For a moment, I was abashed by my statement, but then narrowed my eyes when the corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. “You can’t  _bait me_  into making love to you when I have  _other things_  to do.  I’m too smart for that.”

“I dinna take yer meaning.”  He looked the part of a leading man, his full and curving at the corners.   _Begging to be kissed_.  Handsome.  Beguiling.  Almost irresistibly sexy with his soft touch crawling slowly across the flat plane of his abdomen.

“You know  _precisely_ my meaning with your shirt like that… looking at me… like  _that_.”  I bit down on my lip, tucking my computer into my handbag and methodically winding the power cord in an attempt to forget the image. He had not been  _playful_  and  _needy_  in too long.

“I’ve been packed for  _days_ , Sassenach.  Ye’re punishing me for yer own procrastination.”

“ _Punishing_  you?” I laughed, reaching over to ruffle his hair.  “You’re  _funny_.”

“Tell me I’m wrong.  Tell me that ye’ve no’ procrastinated yer packin’ just as ye do  _any time_  we go somewhere.”

I couldn’t fault his observation, so I shrugged.  Mismatched clothing littered the bathroom floor in puddles.  The refrigerator needed a good wipe down.  And I needed to move the couch a few inches to cover a perfectly round spot of cherry red nail polish on the ivory rug.  

“We have things to do that don’t involve  _play_.”

“We can split the chores? Ye go handle yer clothes, wash yer wee things that smell like yer sleep sweat.  I’ll get the kitchen into tip top shape.  Then…  _we play_.”

Leaning over, I placed a hand on the center of his chest and kissed his cheek, conceding that only “ _maybe, we’ll see_.”  

At his frustrated grumble, I rolled my eyes at him once more.

“ _A dhia_ … if ye keep rollin’ yer eyes at me they’ll  _stick_  there.”

The sheer amount of  _normaling_  in our evening and banter filled my bones with light.  If  _hope_ could be a feeling, it existed in the stubble beneath my lips, the cocky tilt to his head as he sought my lips.  

We went about our chores separately.  

I packed my bags carefully, discarding anything that I thought would become a conduit for memories of California after once home.  ( _Clothes purchased at Target. Half-finished Sudoku books. Nearly full bottles of shampoo that did not smell like either of us_.)  I laid prone on the floor, sweeping an arm beneath the bed to reclaim lost useless things.  ( _Half a dozen bobby pins.  An empty bottle of muscle relaxers.  A pair of my panties.  A handful of dust bunnies._ )  Each drawer in the dresser, nightstands, and bathroom was subjected to a thorough inspection.  ( _A mostly full box of condoms.  My sunglasses.  A journal that I had purchased for Jamie that he had not become the keeper of a single of his mind’s words.  A squishy occupational therapy ball that he had declared “lost,” but was conveniently tucked behind his shaving kit._ )  I started a half load of laundry, transferred it into the dryer, and finally breathed a sigh of relief.  

Soon, all that would be left of us in this bungalow would be a constellation of fingerprints on furniture and stainless steel appliances.  And I was better than okay with only leaving a poorly cleaned crime scene behind.

I wandered out of the bedroom to the kitchen, my lower back cracking in a series of satisfying pops.

The kitchen was perfectly clean.  

At the center of the well-polished countertop, the wick of a single candle burned, its glowing nub hosting the seductive dance of a low flame.  A note peeked out from beneath the candle.  I removed it carefully.  The handwriting  _felt_  like Jamie’s ( _small, blocky, capital letters_ ), but it had the slight slant of discomfort to it.  As though someone had done a not quite faithful job of forging his hand.  

Before reading it, I traced the  _J_ at the bottom, concentrating my attentions on the slight stutter at the horizontal swipe atop the swoop.

_The fruit we need to use is cut and on a plate.  Made sangria with the wine we need to finish off.  I nicked your swimsuit from your carry-on.  (Do you really think you need that in your carry-on? You’re the worst packer.)_

( _Three neat underlines emphasized “carry-on” and “worst.” The indignation in his script made me smile as I reached for the carefully-folded pile of black fabric._ )

Craning my neck, I chanced a peek at the patio through the small window above the sink.  

At the shallow end of the pool, Jamie floated on his back with his arms telegraphing concentric circles out in the water and tropical print swim trunks billowing out around his frame.  He looked well and truly at peace out there, hair gone auburn in the water and arms moving slowly, feet suspended and unmoving beneath the surface. I allowed the scene to settle in the pit of my stomach before stripping in the center of the kitchen.  

The new bikini was too tight –– purchased weeks earlier when I had barely eaten in a month and had no plans to resume a caloric intake sufficient to in any way sustain my shape. Cursing, I fiddled with the ties between my breasts and at the hips, but finally gave up.  “It’s not like  _you’ll_ complain if my tits are hanging out,” I muttered finally as I shot a glance back out at my floating husband, retying my bun and opening the refrigerator.  

True to the promise in his note, a pitcher of sangria filled a large mason jar to the rim, overripe peaches and strawberries bobbing drunkenly as I removed it.  On a tray in the crisper, slices of watermelon, pineapple, and mango made a somewhat disturbing smiley face.

With the accoutrements for our last meal in the bungalow gathered, I made my way outside.  By moonlight, it was almost too cool to swim, but he seemed to be doing well enough in the water.

“I’d have said you need at least two more weeks before submerging yourself in water like this. That incision is no small thing, and––”

“Claire Can ye no’ doctor me?  For one night?  Just…  _wife_  me…”  

His voice was firm, but almost desperate.  _Pleading_.

And ( _oh Lord_ ) I could not resist that look.   _Those eyes.  The hopeful set of his mouth_.  Inhaling through my nose, I attempted grace.  “ _Wife_  you? Isn’t that the verb for  _marrying_  someone?”

“Could be, Sassenach.”

“How on earth did you manage to get yourself into the pool?”

He came out of his floating position, brought his legs under him, and gave me his most disarming smile as his eyes moved curiously over my body. “I stood at the stairs, brought the crutches into the water until I was on the second to the last step.  Took off the brace.  Stood one-legged on the stairs, wondering what I should do.  Then I thought  _YOLO_  as Californians are wont to do, and tossed the crutches and the brace, and then, I well… sorta  _flopped_  forward.”

Smirking, I set the fruit and sangria down at the pool’s edge.  “YOLO? Really?”

“Aye.   _YOLO_.”

“Hmmm, so 2013 of you.  It would have been quite the sight to behold, I’m sure.”

He began to paddle his way towards me.  I removed his watch and battered mobile from atop a single fluffy towel on the lounger, refolded the terry cloth in half, and placed it at the edge of the pool.

“A better sight would be watching ye getting into that wee suit.  How on earth did ye manage to get yer ass into it?”  

I sat on the towel and let my legs dangle into the water, grimacing a little at the its temperature.

“Christ…”  He faded away, breath hitching appreciatively. “Ye look  _perfect_.”

This time, my breath hitched.   _There was no better balm for all of this than my husband’s flirtation._

“Thought I’d die when ye bent over to get that towel.”

I looked down at myself, the almost comical half-moon orbs of my breasts at the sides of the cups, lamenting a little blandly, “It’s too small.”

“Oh aye, and that’s why I call it a  _wee suit_  and why it’s so appealing, ye ken.”

“Hmmm.”  From the way his eyes fixated on the curve of my waist, the pressed together swell of my breasts and flare of my hips, I could tell the reaction was genuine. It gave me no small amount of pride that I had inadvertently grabbed this particular suit in the store.  “Tell me, my lad.  How do you plan to get  _out_  of the pool?”

 _Jesus Christ._   

The dismissiveness of his smile, the little shrug he offered.  

I could feel the earth’s rotation beneath me.

“Dinna have the least bit of a clue.  Hadna really thought it through until I got in here.”

He selected a piece of watermelon, bit into it, made an exaggerated sound of pleasure, and held it out like an offering.

“I’ll select my own fruit.  _Thanks_ ,” I said with a put on haughtiness that I hoped he would find coy.  From the skeptical  _mmmhmm_  noise he made, he took the comment in the spirit intended.  I feigned pickiness over which chunk of pineapple to select. For a few minutes we made our way through the fruit and the two small paper cups of sangria that I poured.  

Mostly, we just talked about the logistics of our return home.

 _Jenny would pick us up (because, according to my husband, my sister-in-law “needs to see with her own eyes that I’m no’ deid”).  Buffalo Bill would come later in the evening after we were settled (my lips pouting at the tenderness in Jamie’s voice at the mention of our pup).  He would not hear of moving the bed downstairs at least until he was off crutches (“I’m no’ an invalid, Claire,” voice hot with the annoyance).  A flash of disgust at my suggestion that he not return to work for at least two more weeks (becoming a hill I would not die on, I raised my hands in surrender_ ) _._

It appeared mostly to be a diversionary tactic from his when he said,“Ye’ve got a wee bit on yer hand there…”

I went to wipe my hand, but he caught it by the wrist.  

“Dinna wipe yer hand on that towel,” he mumbled, eyes ensnaring me as I stumbled unwittingly into his trap. Chlorine-scented fingers drew my hand towards him.  The water slapped against the pool filter as he rose up slightly.  

_Slap.  Gurgle.  Gush._

His tongue transfigured into a careful snake, roughly cleaning my wrist and then side of my hand.

I started, “What are you––”

But when he sucked my little finger into his mouth, he startled a meek sigh (“ _oh_ ”) from the lowest recesses of my lungs.  

Laughter vibrated from the core of him and through the delicate bones of my hand, up my wrist.

Dumbly, I mumbled, “You’re a tabby.”

“ _What_?” His tongue snaked out against the base of my fingers, giving me a firm lick.

“An orange tabby.” The turn of his brows spoke of a decided confusion as he carefully set my hand back on the towel. I had committed to the metaphor, and forged onwards. “Cleaning me.”

“I dinna like cats,” he said quite clearly, his wits clearly intact as he carefully pushed apart my knees.  Water slopped out of the pool onto my thighs. Goosebumps erupted from the combined sensations of cool water and warm, firm nearness.  

Swallowing hard, I whispered, “I  _know_  you don’t like cats.”

Lips found the crease of my left knee.

The contact was teasing, not exactly ticklish as he mapped the curve to the back of my calf.  

Mouth dry and slow, eyes fixed on me through a fan of fat, sun-bleached lashes, he heated my blood. Made it rise to the surface, where my skin was thinnest.  

( _Wrists –– fine bones begging for the imprint of his broad thumbs.  Eyelids –– flesh a of a half-millimeter thick inviting the permeation of light, to make it glow pink, lined with blood vessels and protecting the orbs of my eyes.  Ditches of my elbows –– a hot brachial pulse, so deep, so insistent that it almost ached._ )  

His fingers found my hips, sinking into my flesh possessively.

_Heat bloomed beneath his fingers, under the lined fabric of my suit, straining in my spine to burst free._

“Is  _this_  cat-like?”

He repeated his attentions again, dragging his lips along the same place where earlier his cavalcade of fingers had engaged in an orderly procession. Words to respond to repartee over the stupid little metaphor I started disappeared. Instead I made a sound of disagreement, a quiet little moaning thing that was strangled in my throat before it was born into the space between us.

I could feel the warmth of his breath roll over the fabric, across the flesh just below my navel when he asked, “No?”

The same maneuver applied to my other knee, he adjusted his grip on me.  I tangled one hand in the ringed curls at his nape.

“Not even  _now_?”

“Huh-uh.”

It went on and on just so, desire languishing in my belly, as he experimented on various locations.

I shook my head.

_More.  Once.._

_Left kneecap.  Right shin._

_Twice_.

Swallowing, I shook my head again and again.  “Not even close.”

He lifted one of my ankles out of the water.

_Lateral malleous.  Medial malleous.  The arch of my foot._

_No.  No.  No.  You are not a cat, James Fraser. I take it back._

I could feel the promise of him entering me, moving inside of me.  I could picture my thighs soldered into a pretzel around his pool-slicked waist.  I could sense the light-headed, weightless feeling that would surely make me go dizzy as he moved us through the water.  I shifted to slip my gelatinized self into the pool.  

“Dinna move just yet,” he whispered, hands curling along my calves and drawing my legs further apart.  The windowsills of his eyelids were unable to contain the desire that exploded his pupils, billowed down from his brain like early morning fog to make the blue of his eyes go hazy.

“What are you doing?” I whispered, my voice tucked at the back of my throat.  

The look he gave me ( _head tilted to the side, smirk, eyes catching the space below my hips_ ) told me  _everything_.  

‘ _Making room for my face_ ,’ that look said, absolutely unabashed.

He returned to my long-neglected knee.  

I became the candle light in the kitchen ( _warm, golden, flickering, melting wax languidly beading along my limbs_ ) as his hands found the tie at one hip.

He undid it, carefully setting it down on the towel.

“I have given much thought about what I wanted to do to ye when I had my legs beneath me again.”  

He made a meal of undoing the other tie, pulling one length of fabric between careful fingers.  And then the other until the bow fell open, his pace incompatible with the fading restraint that made the muscles along his jawline twitch.  

“Well, I’m willing enough,” I whispered, going woozy at the proximity of his mouth to me.

“I’ve considered in great detail what I want to do to ye, should I have ye naked and willing, with my feet planted beneath me, enough space to serve ye suitably.”

I reached for the tie between my breasts, tripping over the words: “Well, as for being  _naked…_ ”

He rose up from the water just enough to catch my hand.  “I’ll take care of that.  _Later_.”  Struck dumb, I offered only the mildest cooperation as he slid me forward on the towel, my buttocks coming to rest close to the pool’s edge.  “After I’ve tasted ye.  Everywhere.  The insides of your thighs, where the skin’s so soft.”

The bristled curve of his cheek rested on the inside of my thigh for a moment.  My breath hitched.  

“What am I supposed to do while you do this?”

“Well, ye might moan a bit, if like, to encourage me, but otherwise, ye’re just to sit as still as ye can.”  The huskiness of his voice, the intention in his eyes made it apparent that he needed no encouragement whatsoever. He slipped a hand beneath one thigh, coaxing my leg to the right angle as he looked up at me.  “I love ye, and canna believe we’re finally going home.”

“Ditto,” I responded, for a moment going dead to any sensation other than a deep, pulsing sense of gratitude for him.  For the life in his eyes, the animation in his limbs.

“Now… lean back on your hands.”

 _Need_  replaced that gratitude, and I gave myself to the prospect of becoming lost to him.

The towel gathered under my bottom as he scooted me closer to the edge, whispering, “ _there’s a good lass_ ” in a way that made a flash of heat course between my thighs.  A single curl hung lazily at the center of his forehead, a solitary bead of pool water heavy at the tip. I wanted to reach for it, but his fingers came to me. The shape of a peace sign, a symbol of victory, spread me. It was all I could do to keep looking at him, to stop my head from falling back.

“Do ye ken how fiercely I’ve wanted to taste ye these last few weeks?”

A mere whimper in response: “ _Tell me_.”

“I’ll show ye,” he promised.  

Without prelude, he reintroduced me to the flat of his tongue, sank it into me and sucked with a sloppy popping noise as I rocked into him.  I was untamed against his jaw, one foot planted on the slippery plane of his flank and the other splashing about in the water, unable to find purchase.  

My palms prickled, bled from their attempts to gain traction on the pool deck. The tender round of my inner thighs pinked as they closed around his cheeks, chafing on the few days’ of growth that cast an auburn shadow along his jaw.  ( _I would not care about my palms or thighs until the morning_.)  His fingers were infuriatingly slow, his mouth lacking any sense of urgency.  

My recitation of his name became a stand in for  _please_.

As the feeling crested, he stopped.  “Get in the water.”

A squeal of unknown origin tore through me as he pulled the towel forward ( _half frustration, half surprise, likely_ ), and brought me into the pool. Through sheer instinct and little conscious thought, I wove my legs around him.  The same instinct made me reach for the tie on his shorts, but I found that he’d already freed himself.

“Condom.”  It was a blurred, purring observation as the head of his cock probed against the pink, swollen parts of me. “The water… we should get out.”

“Can I feel ye, just a bit, and then we’ll… relocate?”

Humming, delirious at the prospect of his skin, I nodded, feeling my mind tilt deliciously.  

 _Weightless_.  

_Gravity did not exist._

_But we did._

“I’ve meant to have ye here for awhile. In the pool.  Been thinkin’ of it for weeks.”

The first thrust flooded me, a not altogether pleasant feeling, but eliciting a surprised little sound.  As he began to move, my hold slackened and I let the water carry me.  He drew me closer, varied iterations of my name, Gaelic, nonsense, and a directive to come painted across my neck.  

With the water, there was not enough friction to make good on his request to finish, but I begged him not to stop, to never stop.

Blush colored my cheeks, my neck, my chest, as he fulfilled the request with the kind of unflagging gusto that had been absent from our lovemaking since before the accident.  

The realization bloomed north from my belly, spreading like fire up my throat.  

Everything good in the universe was happening between my legs and I floated ( _literally_ ) with the feeling.  

I cursed, pled.

Jamie ate my profanity as quickly as I confessed it, his tongue insistent as he backed us towards the stairs.  

Almost clumsily, he lowered himself to a step ( _third from the top_ ) and guided me down with a force that made us both groan. The new position, the ability to maneuver limbs combined with the sensation of floating, spilled me like watercolor across a blank canvas.  

Only Jamie’s hands, steady on my lower back, kept me from floating away ( _towards the deep end, up to the moon_ ) as I came, water splashing between us, fingernails carving my signature along his biceps.

“Hold on,” I half choked, overwhelmed as he rose into me again.

Dutifully, he paused and looked down between us. His fingers tested the stretched point of our joining and it was too much, too soon.  A look approaching reverence made his eyes hang heavy and his lips part. That reverence colored his voice as he whispered, “ _Look_.”  

After a few moments, when I ground down over him again, he looked like a new man.  

“I’m going to…” he began after a few rough thrusts. “I canna come inside of ye…”

Something about the prickle of exigency in his voice helped me gather the still scattered bits of my brain.

But it was too late.  

And as I leaned forward, he tucked the fallen bits of my bun behind my ears, muttering my name.  

“It’s okay,” I whispered as he started to draft apologies along the curve of my ear.

At the end of all things, the cessation of shaking and affirmations and the peaking of exhaustion, he pushed us out back towards the center of the pool.  There, we floated with fingertips as our only anchors beneath milky stars and velvet night. Only then did he finally undo the tie on my top, tossing it overhand onto the pool deck where it landed with a heavy slap.

“I’ve never had ye in a pool before, Sassenach.”  

“No, you have not, and now you can check the box.”  

One hand on my waist, and another on a breast, he towed me backwards into the deep end, my legs streaming out in front of me.  

“Aye,  _we_  can check the box.”

The next morning, we set about early.

We filled the gas tank.  Got our last breakfast of egg and chorizo burritos at a taqueria down the road from the bungalow.  

We closed the book on the stand-in routine we created in California.  The routine that had paled in comparison to our mundane reality at home.

On the way to the airport, though, the moment was broken.

“This is it,” Jamie choked.  “Pull over.”

I asked what and why.

He said it again, jaw steeled.

“ _Pull the car over_.”

I parked. We climbed out of the car, and I realized  _why_  without asking.

I had not expected the desert to shimmer like the sea.

 _This was it_.

The place that had attempted to claim him, endeavored to ruin us and innumerable things that had yet to pass.

The landscape dipped and soared, jagged in parts, and in its vice grip of stone and sand, it held a dangerous kind of beauty.  An intoxicating serenity.

We stood staring out over it together, my limbs seized by a sudden paralysis at the endless rusty oranges and ochre clay, the mouth of the place ready to swallow.

Jamie reached for me with his left hand, a crutch tucked firmly into his armpit.

“This is where my rental car was, where John found it.”

My mouth was dry.  I was at once ready to get into the car, to scream with the doors locked and the windows up, and ready to take steps further and further into the bowl of this place.   _A sick interest to see if he was splashed across the rocks and sand there_.

“I was well out… probably a few hours’ hike in.’

Threading my fingers through his, I dropped my head to his shoulder.  

Sweat beaded along my upper lip, burned as it coursed down the small, chapped crack in my top lip.  Perspiration caught for a moment in my eyebrows, a minor detour in its place or origin at my hairline. It burned in my eyes.  My clothes –– a pair of jeans and paper-thin t-shirt –– were heavy with my own sweat.  In the moment, I would have given everything to know what he was thinking.

Tongue heavy, I said his name quietly.  He squeezed my fingers, tongue darting out to lick his lips. Swallowing, I continued, “I’m sorry that this happened to you.”

The sun was amber, the burning horizontal trail it left where sky met craggy rocks and boundless sand glowed violet, pink.  

I wondered if our eyes saw this place differently.  

If the sunrise was somehow less vivid to him.  

If the desert was the color of blood to him.  

Objectively, I could appreciate that this place was beautiful.  That this sunrise ( _the one he demanded to see as we drove to the airport_ ) was precisely the type of thing I would have loved had he made it to his destination, not fallen. If he had made that call to me, apologized and laid bare his regret over what happened with Tom Christie.  

To me, the desert’s beauty had curdled.  My mouth and stomach were sour at the landscape that stretched in front of me.

The SUV was still running behind us.  It was packed with only a few things originating from the place.  There was not much that we wanted to salvage.    The passenger door that he had slipped from on his own, unassisted by crutches, was still open. The soft sound of the music filtered from the speakers, interrupting the eerie stillness of this place.

“We’re going home,” he said, looking down at me, adjusting a little.

I looked at my watch.  

Four hours, twenty minutes until takeoff.  

Two business class tickets courtesy of Jamie’s employer.

LAX to LON.  Some champagne.  A little pharmaceutical assistance to sleep.  A ten hour flight.

LON to EDI. A short flight followed by an even shorter drive.  A shorter flight consisting of little more than a takeoff and a landing.  And then  _home_.

Jamie’s eyes were intent, focused at some point far beyond where we stood.  Touching the hem of his t-shirt and tugging just a bit, I whispered, “We should go.”

A Scottish noise, one that I had longed to hear for days, came from him.  A moment passed, his body still. “This place hasn’t claimed me.  And I’m thankful that we have a long, long time to figure all of this out.”

With a kiss to my forehead, Jamie turned his back on the tableau and made his way back to the car.  I stayed for a moment, staring out over the landscape.  When I turned he was leaning against the hood of the SUV, just watching me.  “Take me home, Claire.”

We drove in silence, hands tangled together over the gear shift.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am going to catch up on your guys' wonderful comments on the last chapter of this and HRH as soon as I can. I'm burning the candle at both ends in real life right now. Please know that I appreciate absolutely every ounce of love you have sent my way. It is all read with an immeasurable amount of glee every time. <3


	22. Part Twenty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A return to home.

##  **Loss (Act II)  
****Part Twenty-Two**

The backseat of John Grey’s artificially-warmed car smelled of a life built over a series of years.  ( _Leather and powder.   Coffee and juice boxes.  Sage and animal crackers.  Aftershave and baby shampoo._ )  

There, in late afternoon traffic, pitched just loud enough for me to hear, Claire’s voice adopted the tone reserved for a lie.

“I’m cold.”

She reached over the carseat separating us. Her fingers fumbled in the rhythm of a first-time piano player, searching for me until I turned my hand palm up. Our digits tangled and she began to stroke the line of the still-healing scar along my ring finger.  For once, her hand was warmer than mine.

“We should get you a new ring.”  

With a body-consuming, ancient, and bone-dry sigh, her head of curls fell to rest on the seat, eyes not fluttering shut, but instead falling decisively closed.  

My guts churned hot and sour as I thought of my wedding band.

( _The ring that she slid onto my finger at our wedding, that had not been removed until cut free in California._   _Now just a shard of twisted metal in a plastic bag and tucked away in my luggage._ )

I turned my back on the passing scenery of our city ( _drizzle, snow, slush, streetlights_ ) to study her.  

When my wife smiled ( _really smiled_ ), it made her whole face undergo a metamorphosis.  

Static beauty melted into a ethereal, carefree kind of radiance.  

The corners of her eyes crinkled.  

But those light etchings had achieved a new permanence in both smiling and at rest.  They must have been new because I had never seen them there, save the moments when her lips turned up and opened to laugh or lob flirtation or teasing my way.   ( _The permanency of those lines was occasioned by me, after all.  The meandering of them became the faint shadow of a charcoal tracing mapping the veins of a leaf on tissue paper._ )  

‘ _I’ve changed you_ ,’ I thought distractedly, catching John’s eyes in the rearview mirror.  His gaze was as steady as it was unreadable before he turned his attention back to the road, leaving me in my moment.  ( _An accusation we had lobbed back and forth over the years of our friendship._ )

After a series of long seconds, the disembodied clacking of the turn signal as we pulled closer to home pulling me back into the moment, I said, “I’m cold, too.”  

Mine was not a lie.  I was cold, and I ached.  

 _Everywhere_.

My muscles had drawn in on themselves in hot spasms ( _at the base of my skull, lower back, thighs, calves_ ). Each hair follicle on my head, arms, chest, thighs, and shins was alive with sensation, pulsing.  

We rode in silence, an uncommon thing for a ride in John Grey’s car, and pulled up to the front of our house.

“We made it,” Claire narrated unnecessarily as she unfastened her seatbelt.

I had not realized she was awake.  

John exited.  

In near silence ( _the car settling with sharp little pangs and pings_ ), she looked at me.

“Aye, we made it.”

Parallel words, my voice cracking partway through. A smile that reached her eyes, which lifted to meet mine.  Our hands squeezing one another as we each reached for door handles on opposite sides of the car.

Claire, helping John unload our luggage into the snow-crystallized gutter, asked if David knew to hold the dog.  John said something in response, but I had already made it halfway up the path, gritting my teeth as the rubber feet on the crutches caught in the space between the cobbles.

In my mind,  _home_  had become a mythic thing.  

A palace.  A fortress.  

Larger, sturdier, grander.

But in reality, our place was well maintained and wholly unassuming.

Quaint.  Beautiful.  Ours.

White brick with the ghostly markings of a previous season’s ivy. ( _An autumn of maintenance with Claire’s hair tied back in a kerchief and t-shirt tied up above her navel. An opportunity to fondle her in a shower after we stuffed bags upon bags with leaves and frostbitten foliage for compost._ )

Cobble-paved front walk. ( _Thoroughly salted, likely by David_.)

Entry door with Claire’s paint swatches. ( _Shades of blue and green lined up like tarot cards; draw five cards, place them face down, flip one face up; the temperance card — the flow of knowledge into cups, a third eye for sight._ )

A light fixture that Claire had disassembled after a tough day at work to repaint oil-rubbed bronze and hung at an odd angle. ( _Something I had promised to fix the morning of that ill-fated gala, but had not gotten around to._ )

A mail slot that squeaked when opened. ( _The nails on a chalkboard that no amount of WD-40 would ever bring to heel._ )

The front room glowed with the pale light of the flea market floor lamp that Claire loved and I pretended not to hate.  ( _Christ, I would treasure that lamp now. Until the day I died, I would love the sight of it coming up this walkway.  Make a meal of watching my wife contort her body to look under the shade to find the switch as she turned it on and off.  Feel Home – a proper noun – as an emotional state as she settled her thin frame into the belly of her favorite chair — feet tucked beneath her bottom and oversized sweater swallowing her whole — to read her medical journals and sip wine._ )

David threw open the front door, a towel over his shoulder and almost shouted my name as he barreled down the three front steps to me.

“Can I hug ye, man?” he asked, his voice its usual full baritone with a chesty boom like stained mahogany.  When I nodded, my best friend’s husband nearly crushed me to his chest, one arm coming up to hold the back of my head squarely.  He was at least two inches taller than me and  _huge_.  I suddenly wondered if this is what Claire felt like when I hugged her.  ( _Dwarfed in her entirety.  Surrounded utterly.  I hoped so._ )

Squeezing my shoulders a bit tighter as he pulled back, he said, “Ye gave us a terror wi’ yer tumble.”

 _My tumble_.

Neither voice nor words were my own when I admitted, “Thought I’d never see m’home again.”

David pulled back, still holding me firm.  “But ye  _did_ , Jamie.  Ye’re home.Yer lad’s penned out back wi’ Celia and her au pair.  Soup’s on the stove.  Ye look…”

The pause betrayed too much.

“…braw.”

Claire was at my side, small hand creeping beneath the hem of my coat and slipping just beneath the waistband of my jeans.  “He’s come leaps and bounds from where he was.”

“Quick bite, and we’ll be out of your hair,” John interrupted from behind us. I cast him a glance.  With bags slung over each shoulder ( _one of mine, one of Claire’s_ ) and the handle of a suitcase in each hand, he looked in no small part to have adopted the starring role as  _pack mule_.  

I wondered how I could ever repay his kindness, the sacrifices he’d made.  Leaving David for those endless days.  Seeing his daughter by video chat only as she gathered words daily, becoming a fully-formed human more and more each day.

Despite my gratitude ( _which welled in me like a fountain bound and determined to overflow_ ), hospitality was foreign to me as a concept.  

Greed was all I had.  

Greed for time with my wife, alone in our home and maneuvering around our own furniture.  

Greed for a hot shower with her body slippery under my hands and her fingers working a certain magic in each muscle along my shoulders.  

Greed to sit and stare into a fireplace, throwing a tennis ball absently from the living room into the kitchen and listening to Claire shriek about the dog’s toenails on wood flooring.

Greed to revel in the gratitude of being here, just breathing with limbs intact.

And if it weren’t for Claire’s bona fide expression of pleasure at the soup (“ _sounds perfect_ ”), I would have been perfectly fine ushering them out of our house with little more than a mumbled apology and promise to catch up soon.

“Aye,” I echoed. “Perfect.”  I said it even though little seemed worse to me than the prospect of sitting through a meal and a dram, listening to some music, and having a chat.

I followed Claire across the threshold and inhaled deeply, my eyes inventorying our space from one corner of the entryway to the other.

I had expected the warmth of the house.  The crackle pop sizzle of our roaring fireplace, the heat hissing from the radiators.

I had not expected that the lived-in scent of us would not have even had the good grace to linger ( _the amalgamation of my wife’s scent with my own, the citrus and sandalwood candle that she had been taken with of late mingled with woodsmoke and her organic cleaning products_ ). Our home just smelled  _clean_.  A blank slate for us to repurpose a new scent together.

Inside, unwrapping herself of her many winter things, and tucking them away in the front closet, I watched the curve of Claire’s shoulders loosen, her posture relax. It was as though her very bones were exhaling a sigh of relief.  

When she was finished putting away her own things, she came to me.  She fixed her eyes on mine as she unzipped my coat, unwound my scarf, and slipped her hands into the back pockets of my jeans. Beaming at me, hands curving and squeezing, drawing me closer, she whispered, “We made it home.”

“How many times are ye going to say–”

Fingers tightening almost viciously, her smile widened, the lines around her eyes deepening.   _A happy smile._   “A million times, my lad.  A thousand million. I’ll say it daily until we sell this house.”

She kissed the center of my chest.  She kissed the bare space just below my Adam’s apple.  She kissed the underside of my chin.

“Bend down just a bit,” she encouraged me.  When I lowered my chin, she just barely brushed her lips over mine.  “We made it.”

Humming, I kissed her nose.  “Ye’re just fine, Sassenach, but I miss my dog all the same.”

She rolled her eyes then, giving my arse a final squeeze before turning, the scent of her perfume catching my nose.  I caught her wrist, and drew her back.

“I love ye.”  

I hadn’t said it enough in those last few months.  In the months of that first year of marriage that everyone told me would be hardest.  I’d be goddamned if I wouldn’t say it now.  If I wouldn’t show her now.   _Over and over again_.  Until she tired of hearing it, and I would be tasked with finding new words to convey an ever-growing, always-evolving sentiment.

As quickly as the moment swelled, threatening to overtake me, a flash of auburn fur streaked down the hallway.  I had just enough time to lower myself to the entryway bench before Buffalo Bill started to jump and emit a high-pitched keening noise. ( _The type of dog racket meant for the ears of other dogs and dolphins._ )  Slobber and snot, velvety tongue, and sharp nails did their damage quickly.

“What am I?” Claire asked a little haughtily as she leaned against the wall, though she was still smiling.  “Chopped liver?”

I started to respond ( _the dog would certainly prefer her if she were chopped liver_ ), but took a glance down as liquid warmth spread through the mesh on my trainers.

“The fucking dog is  _pissing_  on me!”

Claire howled, doubling over.  The lines around her eyes had never been so deep as she crowed, “ _Serves you right!_ ”

After a quick rinse of my urine-saturated foot and slobber-coated hands, we ate our soup with little conversation.  I couldn’t keep my eyes off of Claire. The soft lift of the right corner of her mouth when she caught me staring. The way her cold bare toes planted themselves at the edge of her chair, among friends and a thumbed nose at any semblance of table etiquette. Celia’s eyes had drooped to half-mast by the second pass of the bread basket, and John and David took their leave shortly thereafter.

I watched from the middle of our bed as she dropped another log onto the fire.  

“How are you feeling?” she asked as she rose and turned to look at me with her hands on her hips.  She was more beautiful in our own habitat than she had been in weeks.  Hair down, legs bare, wearing clothes that did not smell like the inside of a suitcase or a stranger’s washing machine.  

I could not fathom lying to her, even for a moment, so I replied, “I hurt.”  A breath. “Everywhere.  Shoulders.  Ribs.  My hand’s throbbin’.  My thigh is the worst, though.”

“Can you describe the pain?”  She reached for her purse on the chair ( _the one that usually housed her clean laundry_ ), shuffling through sundry contents of her handbag.

“It feels like the bones are…  _shifting_.”  She cast me a look over her shoulder ( _concerned, confused_ ).

“Shifting? I don’t know that I’ve heard that one before.”

“I ken it’s no’ a medical description. I ken they’re fine in there.  It’s no’ the inciscion. It’s deeper, achier.”

“With that long flight, you were bound to experience at least some discomfort.”  She took a step to the edge of the bed, opening her fist.  Three chalky tablets rested on her palm.  “Honestly, I would be lying if I said I didn’t think that you’re in for a rough night.  Two for the pain. One muscle relaxer. I know you will fight this, but I can’t stand seeing you in pai—”

“I willna fight ye about anything tonight.”  ( _Had I rejected the good doctor’s orders, I knew she would go full Fraser.  An adoptee into the family lineage of marrow-deep stubborness, she would mutter curses. Chief among them “bloody Scot” and “fucking typical stubborn Fraser nonsense.” I would be wrestled to the mattress, no insignificant feat despite the fact that I felt rather poorly, and she would pop them into the back of my throat against my will._ )

As she spun open the lid on her water bottle, her face was a mix. Worry and disbelief tempered by relief that I wouldn’t just suffer through in silence.  Shifting, I could not help the small groan that rose in me and made my lips tremble from effort.  I took the pills from her hand and looked down at them.

I hated this.  All of it.  

Buffalo Bill opened one eye, grunted, and immediately resumed his slumber.  She watched me swallow the tablets, took the water bottle back, and drained the rest of its contents.  “It’ll start working in fifteen, twenty minutes.”  

Grunting something in the neighborhood of “ _thank you_ ” I leaned my head against the cushioned headboard.

“I’m going to go get some extra pillows and another quilt.”

Nodding, I let my eyes travel around our room.  

The covers on our bed.  The bed that I had eschewed on our last night here together all those weeks earlier.

The hook behind the door where Claire’s robes lived in wait for the curves of her body to fill them.  

The mannerly line of ugly rubber shoes she donned for work, lined up in their multi-color glory in the void beneath our dresser.

The framed picture of us on our wedding day, captured by Maggie with her disposable film camera.  Claire’s head tipped back, my lips hovering beside her ear, a shit-eating grin on my face, and my arm around her waist. My lips were poised in that way that indicated I was whispering something utterly lascivious into my new bride’s ear.

I closed my eyes and dipped a hand into the dog’s thick fur, willing myself to concentrate on something other than the ache in my leg.  I counted the bounding of her footfalls down the hall.  When she went silent, I counted Buffalo Bill’s heartbeats — more rapid than a human heart, but considerably slower than usual in slumber.  

I made it to fifteen before I was well and truly asleep.

I woke hours later and relocated to the window sill.

Turning my palm upward, I manipulated my fingers gently.  None would bend more than an inch or two.  My ring finger was frozen and would not move at all.  I held it to my face, studying the twisted scars against the moonlight.  Something broke in me then as she stirred softly across from me, her lips smacking in sleep and cheek rustling against the pillowcase.

I felt myself tremble before the tears begin.  Hot.  Fat.  Round.  Zagging over stubble and down my chin, lips, shoulders, chest.

“Jamie.”

She rose and crossed the room.  Kneeling next to the window seat, she brushed a curtain of hair off of her cheek.  She looked sleepy – face creased from the bed linens, breasts heavy in her sleep shirt, hair an absolute disaster of tangles around her face, eyelids heavy.

“I’m sorry.  I know they did the best they could.”

Astonishment filled me, ricocheting from aching rib to aching rib.  I swiped hastily at my eyelids, brushing the tears away in hot smears.

“What?”  I gulped for air.  “Sorry? For what?”

She took my hand, lightly tracing the crooked lines on my fingers, touching the pit of a cavernous purple scar where a surgeon had cut out infected tissue. “Your hand. It will get better. I promise. It will. It’s stiff now, but I’ll get you the best physiotherapist and occupational therapist and–”

I laid a hand along her cheek, thumb spreading my own tears along her apricot fuzz skin. “Ye think that… I’m grieving for my finger and a few scars? I’m a vain man, maybe, but it doesna go that deep.  At least I hope not.”

“But you–”

I shook my head, and her words fell short. Taking both of her hands, I tugged her up to her feet.  Now she was crying, damn her.  She had never so fundamentally misread me.

“I was crying for joy, my Sassenach,” I said softly.  I collected her tears, the moisture warm on my palms as she started to cry harder.  “And thanking God that I have two hands.  That I have two hands to hold ye with. To serve ye with.  To love ye with.  I was thanking God that I am a whole man.  Still. Because of you. Always.”


	23. Part Twenty-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good days. Bad days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so behind on responding to comments on here, guys. I promise I am reading and cherishing all of your kind thoughts, encouragement, and love. <3 I'll get caught up eventually! I'm kind of attempting to power through these last few chapters and put this act to bed as we get closer to springtime. xx.

**Loss (Act II)  
** **Part Twenty-Three  
**

In recovery, there are good days and bad days.

In 1969, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her seminal work  _On Death and Dying_.  Over time, her “stages of grief” theory managed to suffuse the vernacular of patients and physicians.  The application of Dr. Kübler-Ross’ stages eventually expanded from  _death_  to  _trauma_  and  _survival_.  She became one of  _Time Magazine’s_  one hundred most influential people, and permanently came to aid people to put definitions to the emotions that follow loss.  Suddenly, it became commonplace to hear people talk about grief in her terms. 

_Denial.  Anger.  Bargaining.  Depression.  Acceptance._

But like life, grief is not linear.

Human emotion cannot be neatly sorted into five piles.

Grieving does not proceed in an orderly way.  

Reactions are complex, unpredictable, and sometimes explosive.

Acceptance mixes with other stages.  ( _Becoming a new intermediate stage – frustration_   _perhaps_.)  Memories of past traumas long accepted become fresh.  ( _Scar tissue aches and activates dreams that appeal to the senses as the real thing. A memory lived again. Upon waking, lungs quiver and ache ache ache for air. A sweaty outline staining bedsheets stands in for the shape of a lover who empties his stomach of the contents of a dinner the night before when you laughed and kissed and made love._ )

But the day after we returned home was a good day.  

We cleaned. ( _Jamie was dead set on hoovering the front rug, the sofa, and our bedroom as I stripped our bed and tackled laundry and the lurking, raw scent of rot that lingered in our pantry from some unidentified source._ )  

With hands curved around too-hot bowls, we were the silent patrons of our own kitchen, eating leftover microwaved soup. ( _As I half-heartedly dunked a cracker into the piping hot liquid, I realized that the day was about to bore me to tears for more than just the perfect mundanity of it all_.   _I had never wanted anything more than the quietness of the moment to live forever._ )  

Like slowly draining batteries, we slowed mid-afternoon to rest our jetlag-weary eyes on our freshly fluffed and vacuumed sofa. ( _A nuzzle, a whispered “little spoon” into my nape while watching a fire that Jamie built roar in the fireplace. His arms looped around me and our fingers – his scar pink and shiny - intertwined into a single fist that we held close to the center of my chest._ )  

There, we readily fell asleep. ( _Jamie’s mumbled protest about how we should stay awake was forgotten as soon as it left his lips, his hands simultaneously sealing a throw over our bodies._ )  

Later, not even half awake and still heavy with slumber, we made love there under the throw, our limbs and hips so slow that it barely felt like moving. ( _Our joined hands worked my yoga pants down to the middle of my thighs. His nose nudged aside the neck of my shirt to clamp a humid, cursing mouth to my shoulder while muttering “that fat arse takin’ up the whole couch.” He proceeded valiantly into war – wrestling a condom from his wallet while attempting not to send me to the floor with the entire landscape between my waist and thighs denuded.  He emerged from battle unscathed and victorious before sinking into me, sheathed and moaning._ )  

Afterwards, we polished off the remaining soup and half-watched the evening news. ( _Our need to catch up on local events gave way to an apparent need to race one another back to sleep._ )

The day after that was another good day.  

We spent the morning catching up with the mail ( _magazines, bills, junk, a large envelope of well wishes for Jamie from his firm, including an embarrassingly flowery note from his assistant Laoghaire that made me laugh and Jamie roll his eyes_ ).

In the afternoon, we took John and David out for an inexpensive meal of Indian food ( _where the only thing that would comfort a crying post-lunch Celia was a thumb crooked in her cheek and Unk-well Jay-mee to hold her as my heart exploded_ ). Afterwards, we made the impromptu decision to take in a double feature of Hitchcock films at the cinema.  

When we got home, we showered in turns and made a grocery list. I fell asleep with my reading light on and my Uncle Lamb’s battered copy of  _One Hundred Years of Solitude_  in my hand.  I woke to an empty bed and the distant sound of a late night television program filtering from downstairs.  The light was off.  My book was closed with its place marked.  I drifted back to sleep without a second thought.

And on the third day home ( _the Sunday before I returned to work_ ), all of Dr. Kübler-Ross’ stages had been put into a blender.  A series of good days is statistically predetermined to come to an end.

Our bed was still empty when I woke. The sound of Jamie cajoling the dog to “ _c’mon just bring me the ball, ye great daftie_ ” in the rear garden had replaced the too-loud television.  I went to make tea and toast. When Jamie came in damp from the mist and an earlier shower, he kissed too firmly and smiled a bit too wide.  

“You alright?” I asked between slurps of tea.

“Just fine,” he assured me, his tone clipped.  Over his own tea and toast ( _tea stronger, toast barely kissed blonde_ ), he filled me in on our neighborhood’s happenings from the busybody next door. We made a plan for the most boring of Sunday afternoons, and set out from home.  He carded his hands through my hair, rested his forehead against mine, and closed his eyes.   _He was doing his best to ward off some niggling darkness.  I closed my eyes, hopefully telegraphing to him that I would do the same._

Our car ride was filled with the incandescent teasing of the man who married me. ( _When I sang along to a boy band on the radio, he rolled his eyes.  His entire face beamed when he snarked, “Did the world really need another version of Killer Queen? Was Freddie Mercury no’ enough for them, the bastards?” He was on edge, fighting off a mood and attempting to connect.  I played along. When he asked if I had ever met a stop sign I did not want to roll through, I vehemently disagreed that I ever rolled to a stop. At the next stop sign, he shrieked that he could feel the car never come to a full stop when he rode with me.  Blowing him a kiss, I had just commented that it was a good thing that I was driving._ )

On a lark, we swung into a record store that Jamie loved.  He left with a brown paper bag and a promise of “ _secret songs ye’ve no’ ever heard but’ll love nonetheless, Sassenach_.”  I carried the bag as we made our way carefully down the road on foot to my favorite used book store.  We got lost, putting up minor arguments over what we would read together next ( _his suggestion of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was flatly dismissed and mine of I’ll Be Gone In the Dark rejected with a laugh before we settled on Watership Down_ ).

Our third order of business in our parade of normalcy was to pick out a new mobile to replace the one destroyed in the fall.

Inside of the Apple store, surrounded by sleek titanium and touch screens, our effort to ward off the darkness failed.

Jamie disappeared while he stood right in front of me.  He turned to cold, hard stone – mouth silent, mind working, and face impassive.  The shift in his demeanor started with a teenaged clerk turning the battered mobile over and over in his hands.  Arthur ( _the badge on the lad’s lanyard said, though he looked significantly younger than someone belonging to such a name_ ) was swimming in his t-shirt and needed a haircut.

Moody gray clouded blue and made Jamie’s fingers  _tap tap tap_  away on his thigh.

The descent into a full-blown  _mood_  hastened with the kid’s quirked eyebrow.  A comment about the flakes of dried blood in the spider web of cracked glass.  A chuckle of “ _wot the fuck did ye do to this, man?_ ” and “ _I’m guessing I can upsell ye on gettin’ the military-grade screen protector, aye?_ ”  

An inoffensive grunt from my husband signaled that it was time to move off the subject of the mobile’s condition. But the rather purposeful diversion appeared not to phase the clerk in the least. Arthur just rolled his eyes as he fought to extract the SIM card from the jammed tray, and muttered, “ _Ye really cocked up yer iPhone, mate_.”

Jamie’s breath picked up, his fingers releasing their grip on the hand hold of his crutches before stretching and curling them back around the padding.  His knuckles went white and his jaw tensed.

I reached for his elbow, too tentatively to expect to get much traction.  The quietness, firmness of “ _not now_ ” as he shrugged my hand away made my stomach drop to my feet.  

“Can we hurry this along?” I asked the kid, adjusting the strap of my handbag.

Jamie muttered, “I can handle this, Sassenach.”

I turned away to inspect a stand of screen protectors.  

Twenty minutes later, Arthur had managed to transfer the contents of Jamie’s broken mobile to a pristine, upgraded model.

“Are you okay?” I asked eventually, mind lingering on the easiness of our breakfast that morning.  I attempted to will the frequency of the moment back into existence.  He turned his new phone over and over with his scarred fingers.

“I’m  _fine_ , Claire.”  

The ice in his voice cast a chill into the very marrow of my bones and could have transformed me to another state of being.

Although it seemed impossible for him to get further from me, he somehow managed to add another league of distance as he unfocused his eyes and cranked his body towards the passenger-side car window.  He existed somewhere beyond the reach of the remaining daylight, unraveled and unwilling to come closer to me. “Let’s just get some groceries, and then head home.”

‘ _You aren’t fine_ ,’ I wanted to say.  Speaking it out loud, though, would be acknowledgment of a simple, inalienable truth.  Where there is loss, there are steps forward and steps backward.  Always. Words swirled in my head, beckoning my heavy tongue to speak: ‘ _Talk to me please. Please. Please. Just tell me what is wrong. You’re alive, you’re breathing. We’re whole as long as we have one another._ ’

I said nothing at all.

We got groceries.  He expressed uncharacteristically vague opinions about what produce to select.  ( _“You can’t blame me if the blueberries taste like nothing,” I said as seriously as I could manage, holding two small containers. With a shrug, he simply responded, “I won’t.”_ )

Too tired and dark to cook, we ate take away.  

We sat on the couch where he appeared to watch the fireplace more than the television, his thumb working an absent circle on the bump of my ankle.

After the late news, we brushed our teeth.

Our bodies were on separate planes in front of Jack and Jill sinks.  The same mirror.  The same toothpaste.  The same routine as before the accident, but different.  Never facing, let alone intersecting or touching.  

I wanted him to howl.  To scream.  To pose a fist to shatter the mirror, to allow me to catch his wrist just in time.  I wanted him to show me  _something_.  Anything.

Our fingertips connected, lingering for only a moment with all of our unsaid things passing between us as I handed him the floss. Instead of talking, we flossed.His gaze was steady on me in the mirror, almost studious.  I cringed as the floss snapped against my gums, my tongue pressing into the tender spot to taste the small bead of saliva and blood.

We changed into bed clothes.

Me into a strappy sleep top, leaving my panties on and my jeans in a figure eight on the tile floor. Jamie cursed as he clumsily removed and stepped free of his own jeans, and yanked his shirt over his head.

I shimmied the sticky window on the far side of the room up to half mast. I stood before it, allowing the cool, winter night breeze to wrap around my legs. The kiss of it gave me goosebumps and made the curtains billow up at the center.

By the time I turned, Jamie had peeled the covers down and was sheathed by a thin sheet, his pillow punched into balled submission beneath his head.  I turned off the lights and slipped under the covers beside him, maintaining a purposeful distance between our pillows.  It was as if their touching would be a harbinger of the end of the world.

“You locked the front door, right,  _a nighean_?”

“Yes,” I confirmed, smoothing the duvet over my chest. He nodded in response as though he had known all along that I’d locked up, but was looking for an excuse to say something.  “I locked the back, too.”

“Good.”

 _Silence_.

“I’ve been a class A prick today,” he whispered into the dark.

“You haven–” I began, my mouth betraying the agreement of my mind.

“Dinna lie.”  He sighed, a mirthless chuckle curdling at the back of his throat.  I turned onto my side to face him.  Narrowing my eyes in the dark, I attempted to smooth the contours of his barely visible face.  “Something that kid said… it caught me off guard.  I was back there.  In the desert.  Wanting nothing more than to hear yer voice again.  Spilling my blood into sand for the second time in my life.”

I reached for him.  His fingers trapped mine against his cheek, his lips finding my palmprint.  

( _Lined, biology’s drafting of meandering divots in my flesh, my palm held the truths of my fate. Head.  Heart.  Life.  Claire at nineteen. Drunk at midnight in Brooklyn, stumbling into a psychic’s fourth-floor flat in beer-stained Converse._

_“Well what is it?” I had asked, hiccupping and trying to maintain a light air. “Or is my fate too horrible to be revealed?”_

_Turned blue by the cast of light from the neon sign in her front window, a woman who smelled of Marlboro Reds told me my fortune: The Mount of Venus. A nondescript husband was unlikely to stray far from my bed. Was I a bigamist?_

_I paid her thirty-five dollars in American bills purloined from a nightstand stash maintained in my dead uncle’s nightstand. He was three weeks buried. He had died from…_

_...from…_

_...no._

_I wouldn’t say it even in my haziest moments. He had orphaned me for the second time in my life_.)

“I left ye a message on that phone that we got rid of today.”  

My breath caught, my blood going stale without an influx of oxygen.  

“I recorded ye a goodbye.”

Tears burned behind my eyelids, as I whispered something I had not thought I would ever tell him: “I listened to it.”

_An admission._

“It was the worst thing I’ve heard in my entire life, James Fraser.”

_The mournful way he had spoken my name.  The reverence of a love speaking over (or from) the silk-lined confines of a coffin.  The thesis of his one-sided recorded conversation was seared onto my memory verbatim, his voice sun-choked and dry: “If this is where I die, I need ye to ken a few things.”_

_Silence._

That first night in California came back to me.  

That nondescript hotel room with its thermostat set cold enough that my breasts and the tip of my nose ached. The comforter overbleached, held to my face in a desperate attempt to smell him there as I wept with his mobile in my hand.  

Listening to his message, I had wondered how he could somehow sound nostalgic as he wrote his own obituary to me about things that had yet to pass.  

_Children._

_Grandchildren._

“I wish I could have been there–”

“I don’t wish that.  Couldna wish that,” he said emphatically, putting an end to the sentiment. “It’s just that... I keep reliving those hours.  When I  _sleep_ , the fear of losing ye is back.  It terrifies me.  I told ye no’ to waste our time worrying. And here I am...”  

His voice trailed away and I slipped my fingers into the hairs at the base of his neck that held his scent and were the softest.

“It’ll be alright, won’t it?” he whispered haltingly.  “I mean, we’ll be alright?”

I tightened my grip in his hair, shaking my head.  “I’ll see to it, Jamie.”  

 _A truth said aloud for him, for me_.  

“Your hand is well on its way, and you’re really doing quite well with the occupational therapy from what your therapist said back in California.  And your leg will heal up–”

“I ken that.  I said as much to ye last night.  I’m no’ a vain main, and I’m nothin’ if not determined to get my body back.”

I suddenly felt somewhat defensive, my thumb skating over the stubbled bow of his upper lip.  “I was listening last night.  I...”

He shook his head, kissing my thumb to silence me.  “I’m fucked up in  _the head_ , Claire.  I shut down today over a  _phone_. A fuckin’  _phone_  did it.”

I wanted to turn on the light, but was afraid that the glow of it would send his honesty skittering away. Unsure of what more to say, I whispered, “ _Everything_  takes time to heal.”  

His body.  His soul.  His heart.   _Him._   Me.   _Us._ We needed the protection of scar tissue, time, and distance.

“I dinna want ye to blame yerself, but I thought I was going to die.  Alone.”

His words stole my breath.

( _It felt like an occurrence a century old._

_When his body quivered against mine with the self-contained universe of the only tears shed following his father’s funeral.  He had shown up at my flat after he left Broch Mordha. He had a key by that point, but he nevertheless buzzed at the secured entrance. He simply said, “It’s me.”_

_When I opened the door, he grabbed me by the belt and pulled me to him hard as the door slammed shut. Deft fingers divested me of my belt and jeans as he uttered statements of need, desire.  An urgency to get lost in me for awhile muttered against my throat._

_“Okay, okay,” I had whispered, fighting myself free of my sweatshirt as he stripped the rest of me bare.  Taking me on the couch, he had been rough. Demanding to the point of clumsiness with my body. Misfiring a thrust against my belly. Cursing and squeezing my hips to land home on the second attempt. Claiming me in a way that would have been fun had I not known the blind lust for me was coming from utter devastation.  And then afterwards he wept against my throat, apologizing. “There is nothing to apologize for, damn you,” I muttered with my fingers in his hair and lips on his jaw._

_“I canna die like my da did. Wi’out mam,” he whimpered, cheeks dripping sea salt tears onto my lips.  “I mean, wi’out you, Sorcha.”_

_And I had told him then, my need to hold him closer as desperate and furious as his hips had been as he drove into me minutes before, that he would never die alone._

_That I would be with him. A promise hastily made, sincerely meant, impossible to keep: “Old. Alone. In bed. Wrinkled and grey.”_ )

Swallowing, his conclusion brought me back to the moment.   _His solitude in the desert._

Sure I had envisioned him dying alone out there.  I had spent hours jiggling my legs at airport gates, in cars, and waiting room chairs picturing it.

But his frankness in laying bare the moments made a picture bloom in my mind’s eye.

A nondescript desert ( _like a movie set mockup of the real thing_ ) swallowing him. The sun. No shadow dwelling to shelter or provide respite. Heat leaching the life from each pore, making his tongue a dry, useless appendage in a papery mouth.  Sweat salting his upper lip, burning the inner corners of his eyes.  Dust and clay smeared in arcs over his cheeks, forehead, brows as he tried to wipe away perspiration.

And then the failure of a body.  

A gasp, the sunlight filling his bones aching to burst free and stripping his lungs clean of air, his heart clear of its ability to exist as an organ any longer.  

These were the things that happened to the man I loved the most.

These were the things that happened to him while I seethed over our argument. As I assumed that he was giving me the cold shoulder. In the same moments that I ate that fucking Snickers bar that  _Tom Christie_  brought for me. As my laughter with the man painted the walls of my offices, Jamie was thousands miles away in dirt.

“You’re carrying too much.”  I sounded desperate, soft,  _guilty_.  Though it seemed an inadequate acknowledgment to my usually stoic husband’s stripped bare admissions, it had the benefit of being  _true_. I slid closer to him.  As though I could absorb some of his pain, I pressed myself against him, hoping that the feeling of skin ( _of me_ ) would ground him.

What this was  _really_  about stole my breath.

“I thought I’d finished carrying Afghanistan when I moved out of that cave, and struck out on my own. When I met you, a nighean.”

He smelled of sunlight and toothpaste.  The tangy bite of stress sweat deep in my sinuses.  His arms snaked around me and pulled me tight, bracing himself against me.  The wiry hairs of his thighs tickled my legs.  

Only the God he prayed to in his quieter moments ( _alone, head bowed_ ) knew much weight he carried, but I would have readily shouldered some of it.  I smoothed over the band of sweat framing his spine before I anchored my thumbs into the elastic of his boxer shorts.  I asked if I could take some of the weight from him.  Time passed without an answer.  I closed my eyes, focused on the symphony of our breathing mixing with the noises of our home.  

_The dog’s snoring on the floor.  The refrigerator that sounded at least a little off since we returned.  The soft pelting of sleet against our bedroom window._

_And then my mind trained itself to silence_.

Days after his father’s death, I had promised him that we would die together, wrinkled and old.   Before our wedding, we sat on our bed with our hearts bleeding our veins into one another.  ( _Blood of my blood.  Bone of my bone.  I give you my spirit.  ‘Til our life shall be done._ )  On our wedding day, I had vowed to him that we would  _live_  together, as one. ( _Sickness.  Health.  Good times.  And bad._ )

“Do ye ever get sick of holding me together?” he asked eventually.

“Never,” I whispered.   _A truth as certain as any I had ever known._  “The desert had your body, but I’ll be damned if I let it have your soul as well.”

Pulling the bulk of him across the bed to me would have been impossible, so instead I slithered across the mattress towards him.  As carefully as possible, I situated the fronts of our bodies together and rested my forehead against his. His eyes closed, as if he were unable to maintain eye contact. I watched his mouth, felt a tickling gratitude for his even breath on my lips.

“Do ye ken why I love ye as I do?” he asked when I had been well and truly lulled into a half-conscious, pre-sleep state.

“Why’s that?” I asked, licking my lips and fighting to open my eyes.  He was staring at me intently, a little too fervently. It made my stomach flip.

He kissed me on the forehead.  “Because ye smell so nice.”

I rolled my eyes before I closed them.

We would be just fine.  With enough time.


	24. Part Twenty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to work for Claire. Back to work in more ways than one for Jamie. A packed lunch and a cheeky note.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting so close to the end of Act II. Only a few more parts remaining! 💜 Thanks everyone as always for the love over this story. I'm continually gobsmacked by your comments. I know I'm super far behind responding; I'll catch up at some point, but real life is really kicking my ass right now. <_< I hope you have a great weekend.

##  **loss (act ii)  
** **part twenty-four  
(jamie p.o.v.)**

Though I had never been much of a partier, Claire Beauchamp turned me into a homebody early in our relationship.

It started with weeknights on her couch in our early days together.

Watching movies. ( _Her film suggestions were so obscure that tracking one down had required the purchase of a creaky, dust-covered VHS player from a thrift shop that moaned when she hit “rewind.” The blockbusters that I suggested so ubiquitous that I could not hide my exasperation when she asked who certain stars were, and I echoed, “Really?”_ )

Reading to each other aloud. ( _Draped across or wound around one another on various surfaces. My bed and her declaration that Harry Potter was her least favorite character in the eponymous series met by a disgust so visceral that it took me a moment to recover.  A pile of blankets on her living room floor, Claire getting onto all fours and crawling for my messenger bag with her knickers pressed into the crease of her buttocks, insistent that we finish off a chapter before I took her to bed._ )  

Flipping through file folders of take home work projects before dinner. ( _Her body migrating closer to me across the couch – closer and closer until I could read the indecipherable text of her medical journals and feel her stomach’s quiet grumble of protest at a skipped lunch._ )

The first time she asked me to stay over on a weeknight. ( _Her sleepy fingers pulled me to my feet, eyes gone a mellow whisky – though surprisingly vibrant, vigorously stubborn, and commanding in its oakiness. I stuttered an uneasy, “Are ye sure, Sassenach?” The roll of her eyes as she said, “Of course.”_ )

It was well before we had a physical space to call our own. ( _A flat. A house._ )

There hadn’t been any sort of declaration of  _forever_.  ( _Time had not granted the sharing of the entry code to the security door at her flat or matching addresses to put on forms.  We had not had discussions about marriage or children, merged bank accounts with homes in the suburbs or mortgage payments._ )

Long before we were handfest in the center of our bed. ( _She had shown such indulgence in opening herself, to allow her blood to pulse low and slow into my veins, where her love had run into me for what seemed an eternity._ )

No, well before these milestones, Claire had confessed something rather remarkable.  

_On the first weeknight in her bed.  Not to bed (at least at first).  To sleep._

“I’m sure,” she affirmed, any hesitancy that I’d ever seen in those early days washing away with the words.

 _Home_  became something new in that moment.  

The envelope sealing my fate was torn open without ceremony, the wax seal that was the color of her eyes flaking apart to reveal what was inside.

The night was different, and it became the letter tucked in that envelope.  She drew the duvet over our heads as she made love to me, sealing our breaths and utterances within the humid dome of her covers.  She sucked my finger, slow and hard, and guided it between her legs.  “ _Here_ ,” she whispered, eyes ablaze.   _A trap_  for the unwitting.   _A respite_  for the witting.  

Afterwards, we faced each other on our sides for ages until she pulled the edge of the duvet down under our chins.  The air in her bedroom had bite, and I could taste her sweat on my lips when I kissed her forehead.

“Home is something indefinable when you’ve never had one.”

Her statement was out of the blue, but somehow also  _not_.  She trailed a single fingernail up the centerline of my stomach as she spoke. Her voice had gone husky, as if in her head she’d already screamed her throat raw with the sentiment.

“You can  _long_  for a home, but you never really  _know_  what you’re missing, right?”

I swallowed, trying to digest what she was saying. Her eyes flickered down, uncertain. I took her by the small of the back, bringing her closer. ‘ _I’m listening_ ,’ I thought to say, but didn’t.

“I mean, you can’t  _miss_  something you’ve never had. You can know only in the abstract what you’re missing, but not  _really_  know it until you have one. Am I making sense?”  

She was making perfect sense, so I told her that I understood.   _And I did.  All too well._

Trapping her hand beneath mine, I stopped the course of her fingernail.  

“Who knows, though,” she chuckled, the lightness of her tone betraying an unbearable ache that she plainly was endeavoring to shed like a selkie coming ashore for the first time. “Perhaps it’s just some orphan babble really.”

“Claire, it’s no’ babble, I–”

“You don’t need to  _say_  anything, Jamie,” she assured me, silencing my mouth with her own as she yanked the duvet back over our heads. When she broke apart, she sounded completely self-possessed and genuine when she declared, “ _You’re_  enough.”

Then, deep in the night, on that first weeknight only a few short years before California, I heard her declare that  _I_  was her home.

Her words were reedy and damp.  

She batted my hand away when I went to wipe away the tears that caught the sliver of silver moonlight making its way through her parted curtains.

“ _Ignore me_ ,” she mumbled, burrowing closer to me beneath the covers.  

My only answer was “ _okay_ ” and to draw her closer to me as she gurgled quietly against my bare chest.  ( _“Jamie Fraser,” she said again and again._ )

And since then, I’d had a new appreciation for it.  

For  _home_.  

For a place for the mythical vase that she had told me about so early on.  A dedicated station for a vessel simple enough to hold flowers from the cornershop.  For her need to hang onto those flowers for as long as possible, fussing with them in an attempt to make them last.  Until the petals flaked free, the leaves were crisp, and the stems atrophied.

It was a story’s theme as old as time, as us.

 _Home_.

My appreciation for it yet again swelled as we made our way through the weeks after our return from California.

On Claire’s first day back to work, she rose early and silently.

In the night, after my fit over the phone, I had woken panting and sweating beneath the covers, the taste of desert on my tongue and nonexistent sun in my eyes. Carefully, she had calmed me, wiped clean my brow and whispered, “You can’t go on like this.”

I had clung to her until morning, suspended somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.

But then before even the first plum bruise of dawn at the horizon, she rose to get ready for work. Shortly, she exited the bathroom with shower water like dew drops on her skin ( _tan from the desert, freckled shoulders, and too lean_ )and a towel cinched tightly around her breasts. Her eyes were red-rimmed and watery. From sleepness or the least relaxing shower ever, I’m not sure. But it didn’t matter. The guilt and regret were the same, dwelling as ugly twin emotions.

“Are you sure that I should go?” she asked, fingers knotted tight in the terrycloth.  “I can put in for another week.  I could stay. I mean, will you get by without me?”

“Of course,” I assured her, marshaling my most convincing tone and attempting to push the incident with my mobile to the back of the junk drawer of my mind.  

“Will you get some help?” she asked, voice small as her hands dropped from the towel and her shoulders squared.

“Help?” I knew what she was asking, but could not stop myself from echoing it.

“ _Help_.”

I thought back to Afghanistan, the bits of my men splashed across ground in an abstract, macabre way. I called to mind that boy dying beneath my hands with his mouth gaping and gulping like a fish out of water.  I could smell the hospital in Germany. The place where I was sewn back together and ate too-sweet syrupy fruit in plastic cups with aluminum foil lids.  Then there was the time in the cave, living with rock in the vain hope that my mind would shut down entirely or that perhaps the world would end. Those had been the dreams that had woken me, though the phone had been what started the whole thing.

Therapy. I had agreed to go only when Jenny pleaded with me, wept, and confessed that she was afraid that I would take my own life.

After a series of seconds had ticked by with nothing more than the clenching and unclenching of my jaw as a response, Claire added, “For me.  For  _us_.”

It was all I needed, so I nodded.  It was something more than architecture or a vase on a counter to her.   _For us_.

When Claire came home from work on her third day back at the hospital ( _Wednesday_ ), I slid a crisp linen business card across the countertop to her.  

 _Denzell Hunter, Senior Counsellor/Psychotherapist_.  

She set down her canvas bag of groceries and carefully took the card. Her fingers had gone violently pink in the cold. They were chapped and raw at the knuckles.  Her mouth moved.  Perhaps she said his name ( _putting the emphasis on a different syllable than I did_ ), perhaps she didn’t ( _her lips moving simply to get warm, to gulp air that wasn’t freezing now that she was indoors_ ).

In any event, couldn’t hear over the beating of my heart.  

The card wasn’t the first step.

The first step was Google.

Typing  _Edinburgh_.

Drying my palms, licking my lips.  

Typing  _PTSD_.  

Breathing, shaking my head.  Thinking about Claire standing in that kitchen in California as I promised to get better, so we could try for a bairn.   _Our bairn_ , the one that I had wanted with her almost from the moment that I first took her into my bed.  

Typing  _counsellor_.  

Scrolling through the results for a small three-person practice just a short distance from home.  Walking distance if I had full use of my legs.  

Calling.  

Driving a car a short ways for the first time since California ( _clumsy and cursing_ ), thankful for Claire’s insistence on automatic transmissions.  

Going inside.

_Etcetera._

The card was perhaps the thousandth choice that day to get back to us.

“He’s a veteran,” I explained, moderating the shakiness in my tone for her benefit.  “Army surgeon.  Sees mostly guys… like me.”

She set the card down and rounded the counter.  Her jacket smelled like flowers and coffee when she wound her arms around me, rising onto her tiptoes and tucking her face against my throat.  She smelled like someone who had walked through a cloud of someone else’s cigarette smoke.  

I stayed still for a beat, eyes focused on the clock above the door. ( _It was five minutes too slow_.)

“I’m so proud,” she whispered. She meant it, I knew, though my insides wanted to accuse her of a meaningless platitude.  At that, I wound my arms around her, gathering her nearer and closing my eyes.

I had my first appointment with Denzell Hunter, Senior Counsellor/Psychotherapist, the next day.  

We talked about this and that.  

_(Afghanistan._

_He was quiet and understanding when my tongue went too thick at the mention, my eyes focusing on the service award from Iraq above his desk._

_He gave me the vague nod of a serviceman when I mentioned Ian’s service and sacrifice there. He probably could rattle off the names of a baker’s dozen of men with only three limbs as a result of their time in the country._

_We scratched the surface of the interlude between Afghanistan and the start of a real life afterwards. “That fucking hospital Jello,” Denzell Hunter added when I griped about the godforsaken cups of fruit._

_And then there was Claire._

_The end of one timeline. The start of infinite other timelines._

_The first taste of a real life._

_I readily admitted that she was the love of my life. I voiced  my disbelief over her declarations that I saved her life, and instead focused on the fact that she had saved mine.)_

I wondered how many times a broken thing can be fixed.  How many words does it take to pluck someone back from the breaking point, the earth crumbling beneath feet?  

My mind fixated on a Lladro figurine that Ian and I had broken playing ball indoors when I was five.

The eardrum piercing pitch of mother’s shriek was ingrained on each of my five senses.  ( _The sound – “it was your grandmother’s, James.” The feeling of each hair on my forearm rising to attention at the ancient distress in eher.  The sour bite of fear on my tongue.  The smell of her perfume as she pushed past me, knocking me to the side as she went to her knees to pick up the pieces.  The wash of tears lacquering her cheeks with mascara as she turned to me over her shoulder._ )

I remembered standing by my father’s side as he glued together jagged planes of porcelain, uttering an entire litany of curses in Gaelic under his breath.

The next morning, the figurine was in the bin with coffee grounds and the gutted, wilting skeleton of half of a grapefruit.

And at the end of the session, when Denzell Hunter asked if I had any questions, I blurted out the one that had consumed me in my entirety.

“Can ye fix me?”  ( _An uncomfortable thought weighting me to the chair, unspoken and unspeakable: Can I be fixed yet again?_ )

“First off, you can’t look at yourself as needing to be  _fixed_ ,” he began carefully, his tone measured. Denzell Hunter had an easy, practiced understanding to his approach. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.  “Our work is more appropriately identifying triggers, coping mechanisms, and plans of action.”

_None of what he said was new to me.  That therapist that I saw in Broch Mordha all those years ago – with the bun atop her head and soft slur between her words – had said it all before.  (“Forgive yourself, Jamie,” she had said.  “Make amends with your past.  Say things out loud.”)  She told me her plan.  She made good on it. And somehow that plan developed a life of its own, breathing into my mouth until my lungs worked again.  Until I stumbled across the man who found and fell in love Claire Bee-cham (not Beauchamp)._

“Second, more to your point than your phrasing, we can certainly improve the symptoms you reported on your intake form.”

( _Insomnia.  Flashbacks.  Disconnectedness from myself.  Anxiety.  Things that I would never willingly show Claire.  Things that I would never ask her to bear, though I knew damn well that she would carry it all for me.  And instead of seeing it as a comfort, it became a burden to shed.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck._ )

“We can bring Claire-”

“No,” I said, my voice clipped.  His gaze remained steady, studying but without any discernible judgment.  “No.  Claire can’t… she is too… I  _won’t_  put her through this.”

“She loves you, yes?”

Fighting the urge to roll my eyes, I dried my sweating palms on the soft fabric of my sweatpants.  “She does.”

It was the understatement of the century.  The woman was a lot of things for me.  Soft where I was hard.  Hard where I was soft.  She was the exhalation of every inhalation that I held until my lungs and chest burned.  My reason to fight, my strength.  The world felt too small, too limited for what Claire was to me.

“If you share your trauma with someone who loves you, if you can hear their response… it will lay a path forward for you.  A path out of this.  I’m talking about  _healing_ , Jamie.  Re-engaging the thought centers of your brain, overwriting the instinctual responses that have been rewired by trauma.”

Nodding, I steeled my jaw and felt wet heat grow in my eyes. ‘ _Don’t you dare fucking cry,_ ’ I commanded myself as my fingers curled around the armest.  “Are we finished for today then?”

“We are.  We’ll see you on Monday, Jamie.”

He passed me a pamphlet, which I took as I hobbled up onto my feet.  He passed me my crutches, and I made my way out of the well-appointed office of Denzell Hunter. The entire way out to the car park, I thanked God and each Saint whose name I could readily call to mind that I did not cry in front of Denzell Hunter, Army Surgeon.

Once in the car with the crutches tucked away, I beat my uninjured hand against the dash to keep myself from crying.

I stopped only at the insistent ringing of my mobile.

 _Claire_.

My eyes focused on something other than my brutalization of the dashboard, and I answered with a soft “ _Sassenach._ ”

I expected her to ask me immediately about therapy, but she was chirping about how she’d found the most precious dog cupcake.

“ _We’re going to celebrate Buffalo Bill’s birthday.  He has one every year, and we just don’t know when it is because he was adopted._ ”

My hand quit hurting.  My lips curved up.  “Tell me more,” I said as I started the car and waited for the bluetooth to flicker on.

On the following Monday I had any early second appointment with Denzell Hunter (“ _Denny_ , _” he’d asked that I call him_ ). Afterwards, Claire drove me to work.  We were both silent on the car ride until she asked if I was ready.  Swiveling my head, I could see her worrying her lower lip between the blades of her teeth.  “Undetermined so far,” I admitted, swallowing hard and reaching for her thigh across the center console.  “But it feels good to get some routine back.”

When we arrived, she parked halfway over the curb and took my face in her hands.  “Is this what a mother feels on her kid’s first day of school?”

“Could be” I snorted, lips my mouth just enough to kiss her palm.

“I made you a lunch.”

“You’re  _definitely_  my mam right now.”

She glowed with blush in her cheeks. “It’s some leftovers, fruit, and I wrote you a note.”

“Oh, did ye?” I raised my eyebrows.  

“I did.”

I could not bring myself to say the word “ _goodbye_ ,” so I gave her a chaste kiss and made my way out of the car wordlessly.

I stood in the lobby of my building and rifled around in the bag she packed.

Claire had probably put a lunch together for me on two previous occasions.  One was when she hadn’t liked the meal I’d made. Barefoot in front of our refrigerator, she innocently suggested that I polish them off for lunch as she dropped the glass container with remaining three servings into a paper grocery bag.  The other was for a potluck when I had a cold and had begged her to make the salsa so I didn’t infect everyone.  

My fingers found the note she’d mentioned.

_J–_

_Today is a new day.  For you.  For me.  The past is gone-the future is not come. And we are here together, you and I._

_Enjoy your lunch._

_Claire_

_PS: Your arse looks incredible in those trousers we bought you this weekend._


	25. Part Twenty-Five

 

##  **Loss (Act II)  
** **Part Twenty-Five**

It became easy to pretend that our pre-California argument over Tom Christie never happened.  ( _Tom’s forwardness. Jamie’s reaction. My non-reaction.  The fight that separated us into separate beds, panting  like boxers separated into opposite corners of a ring with protective mouthpieces askance. The iciness of our goodbye_.)  When Jamie had left for California, he held back on the things he needed to say.  ( _His anger ticking like a bomb, his fingertips fluttering against his thigh. The way that I had wanted him to leave; the way I told him as much._ )

But then he’d been hurt, and thus started a new kind of worry.

How I spoke to him.  Looked at him.  Turned away from him.   _Fled_.

Panic consumed me then.  The prospect that our argument would serve as the last page of an unbelievable love story was the pinpoint end of my tunnel vision.  That our stubbornness would be the ending that I wrote for us would haunt me always.  

Later, with Jamie on the mend, we had carefully avoided the subject of Tom Christie.  

With the duskiness of bruises still settling into my husband’s skin and the looming twin threats of surgery and infection, Tom’s vague history with Jamie became a mystery that I did not care enough about to uncover.

The man’s entire existence in my day-to-day work life had thus remained unspoken between my husband and me.

We stayed closed mouth about it as we made it through a full week of work.  

And then a second.

And finally a third.

On the third Friday of our freefall back into normalcy, I stood in the kitchen entryway and watched him.  The music ( _Elton John - Rocket Man_ ) was up loud enough to cover the racket of my entrance. Not even the dog took notice of me.

That morning, Jamie had returned to our car after his physiotherapy appointment. He had been clearly aching and the bridge of his nose gleamed with a light sheen of sweat. Belting himself in, he muttered that I was stubborn for staying and not letting him take an Uber. By reflex, I reached across the center console to take him by the chin. I firmly guided him until he was facing me. “You married me into this Fraser clan, lad.  I’m just fitting in.”  At that, he smirked and kissed me on the forehead, breathily admitting that he loved that about me.

At the end of the day, standing there in our kitchen, I called to mind the night before he left for California. “ _Can ye imagine how good it’ll feel to see each other again, though_?” he had asked.  Watching him cook, unwinding my elaborate winter wrappings, I realized that the answer was simple.

_No._

_I can’t imagine how that will feel_.

He was cooking, one leg extended at an awkward angle and balanced on a pillow rather ingeniously duct taped to a step stool. It was the reenactment of a thousand other Friday nights, and for the first time in a long time my nerves weren’t frayed along their structure – the branches, the terminal ends, the raw center bits.

“Oops,” Jamie said half-heartedly, sweeping a bit of pillowy white cheese from the cutting board to the floor.  It landed with a moist plop. The dog immediately sprang into action, swallowing it sloppily without so much as the imitation of mastication.

“Brilliant creation, your step stool,” I observed without a greeting, sidling up next to him and slipping an arm around his waist. I tucked a wind-chapped palm into the front pocket of his flannel sleep pants, soaking up the pulsating warmth of his thigh.

“Why thank you,” he said a little blandly, turning and kissing the center part in my still-damp crown, curls matted down from my stocking cap.  “I missed ye today.”

“I actually had a really nice day at work.” He grumbled as he scraped the ingredients of our mystery dinner together. I tightened my grip around his waist, reveling in the smooth motion of his warm bicep as he continued chopping. Rolling my eyes, I clarified, “Of  _course_ , I missed you, too.”

Snorting a derisive little sound, he asked, “Who did ye save today?”

“No saving.” I dipped a wandering hand into the bowl to trap a noodle, an oily shard of sun-dried tomato, and bit of cheese.  My day had been long and routine.  The kind of day that just weeks ago would have had me lamenting the bored grey dreck of it, asking whether I was a physician or a babysitter.  Only half-finished with chewing, I offered, “Six surgeries. All boring, but fun enough.”

“ _Fun_.”  His smirk quirked quickly and disappeared, exposing only the briefest flash of gleaming teeth. “Ye great wee nerd.”

This time, it was my turn to hum, but it was an agreeable sound.  

“What does it need?” he asked, head tipping just enough to indicate the bowl.

“Salt.  Black pepper.”  I ran a finger along the perimeter of the vessel before sucking the sauce clean from my fingerprint. “Some heat.  A little more oil.”

“Ye’re verra opinionated for someone who doesna cook.”

“You’ve made me into a connoisseur of fine trash pastas.”

“ _What_?” he gasped, fake incredulity creeping into his voice as he reached for the olive oil that we had purchased on a long weekend holiday to Italy.  “Trash pastas?  _Me_?”

“ _You_ ,” I levelled, transfixed on the increased dexterity of his dominant hand as he generously doused our dinner with oil.

My mind fell backwards.  

Him.  

 _Us_.  

That trip to Italy.  

Sitting cross-legged on our bed in a incredibly cheap villa. We were secluded from the road by rows upon rows of olive trees, and had joked only half-heartedly that it was the type of location that played host to a hundred of B-list horror movies.  Naked but for the crumpled sheets wrapped around my torso and his hips, careful hands ( _unscarred, capable, warm_ )fed me chunks of bread.  The villa owner listened to Italian opera music down in the garden.  

We were still newlyweds then.

It had happened in another lifetime, but only six months earlier.  

Something about California felt like the bookend to our honeymoon period.  

We were not new anymore.

After dinner, we made a fire and settled on the couch to finish watching Bodyguard, a show that we had started months earlier.  When I commented that I was utterly besotted with Richard Madden’s accent, Jamie had put on an absolute show of flipping me onto my back and pinning me to the couch.  The engine of my brain misfired, switching gears from flirting wife to a concerned doctor-meets-wife.  ( _“Jamie, your leg, don’t–”_ ) It lasted only a moment before he purposefully lowered his voice, broadened his accent, and asked, “Ye like a Scottish accent, do ye lassie?”

“I like  _Richard Madden’s_ accent,” I clarified, laughing as his hands found the bottom of my t-shirt, my stomach, my breasts.

He grumbled, and then got close enough that his lips brushed my ear before saying, “Haud yer weesht.”

I was a total goner.

The next day took the dubious honor of playing host to the start of our first post-California argument.  

We spent ( _not wasted_ ) the next morning falling headlong into the blissful, uninterrupted normalness of being together.

I made breakfast.  ( _My attempt at blueberry pancakes ended with a gelatinous mess of undercooked slop that Jamie ate dutifully with tight-lipped smile. For a time, I waited just to see how far he would go with it, whether the line of our love would be drawn in half-raw batter. When it became clear that he would eat the whole mess, I snorted laughing, stole the plate, and promised him the fried eggs and toast of his dreams._ )  

We prepared the guest room with fresh lavender-colored sheets and twinkle lights for Maggie, who would be spending the following weekend staying with us to celebrate her eighth birthday. ( _The youngest Ms. Murray’s birthday wish was to spend a weekend with her Uncle Jamie and Auntie Claire. It had been arranged well before. Jamie had steadfastly refused Jenny’s attempts to put off the sleepover by explaining, “I’m no’ dead, Janet.”_ )  

We made love to each other with the lazy cadence of two people overly familiar with one another.  A couple without any particular goal other than closeness in mind.  ( _The kind of sex where things are funny – the slippery, popping suction noises of bodies seeking pleasure, unmannered limbs not cooperating with one another’s intentions, bumping noses, and finally a sated bliss where no noises exist at all_.)  Afterwards, while I was melting into the lines of his torso and gulping for air, Jamie confessed that it was the first time he’d felt entirely unburdened in ages.  ( _“Even though ye’ve done more than yer fair share of bein’ on top lately,” he’d laughed, hands curved around both buttocks before giving me a quick, loving smack._ )  

We napped like boneless felines, contorted to stay in the triangular blade of early-afternoon sun filtering a muted yellow through our bedroom window.

We made -  _but did not reduce to writing_  - a grocery list.

We showered, jointly bemoaning the necessity of taking our relationship out onto dry land.  ( _My offer of a doctor’s note by way of a wifely phone call to his partner swiftly and unequivocally rejected with a reference to his honor._ )

And then came the post-shower sprawl on our bed. Wrapped in robes, we procrastinated an indecisive game in which we identified and vetoed party-suitable attire to look instead at pictures on Facebook.

The first album belonged to Jenny.

It was a series of snaps from Maggie’s first ballet recital that weekend. She looked twice her age with thick wings of black eyeliner ( _the occupational hazard of a mother’s unpracticed hand hastily applying drugstore kohl_ ) emphasizing her Fraser cat eyes. In the last picture, she was holding up a handmade sign that exclaimed: “ _Get Well Soon Uncle Jamie!_ ” When  _Uncle Jamie_  went silent next to me ( _the swell of emotion in him chilling me to the bone_ ), I plopped a sloppy kiss along his jawline.  “ _She loves you_.”

The second album ( _entitled “Happy Divorce to Me!” – a topic for another day_ ) had been posted by a bikini-clad Geillis.

From the photographic evidence, half of the surgical nurses at the hospital would return to work rum-soaked, with enviable tans, and harboring the kinds of secrets that create knowing looks between friends.  “ _Sorry ye didna get to go,_ ” Jamie mumbled, the tone of his voice matching the softness with which he was tracing the crease at the back of my knee.  Dropping my head to rest on his shoulder, I told him not to be stupid.

The final album contained a single photograph.

A follow-on from John’s early morning phone call to share some news. “ _Okay, ye’re on speaker phone_ ,  _ye cad,_ ” Jamie had announced over his sloppy stack of half-melted pancakes.  _John and David were welcoming a second baby_. In the picture ( _a blown-out, oversaturated family portrait that was simply beautiful_ ), John was sporting a wild, face-splitting grin and staring adoringly at his husband.  David, for his part, was giving a thumbs up behind a very pouty, tear-stained Celia. Her t-shirt proclaimed: “ _Big Sister est. June 2019_.”

( _Emerald-tinged envy surged into my mouth unbidden at our friends’ happiness. It stole all oxygen from the room, even as I composed a genuine expression of excitement. While we were on the phone, Jamie slipped his arm around my shoulders, apparently knowing, but not having any words of consolation_.)

I was catching my breath from the renewed swell of jealousy ( _a feeling that I thought I had conquered at breakfast_ ) when our argument kicked off.

In Greek mythology, Eris ( _god of strife_ ) lobbed a golden apple over the wall into a wedding party.  The apple, designated for “ _the fairest of them all_ ”( _and maybe this is a criminal mixing of mythology and Disney fairytale lore_ ), started the Trojan War after certain Greek goddesses were jilted.

On our bed, that apple was a text message:

_Beauchamp! Things are looking good with that new wing.  Catch you up at lunch tomorrow?_

At the end of the message was a single emoji: an halo-clad yellow smiley face.

The message was the devil on Tom Christie’s shoulder.  The angel emoji was its foil.

_For fucks sake.  The timing. The emoji.  My feet had only just been firmly planted in normalcy.  Christ._

My husband shifted.  I was too dumbfounded to try to keep him near.

( _When introduced to me, Tom Christie had taken the name badge hanging from a lanyard around my neck between his fingers and tugged a little. “Beauchamp-Fraser? Hyphenates take me awhile.  How about Dr. Beauchamp?”_

_Weeks into our working relationship, he had called me late one evening.  After hanging up, I mentioned that Tom had instructed me to say “hi to your chap.”  At the time, I had brushed aside Jamie’s muttered Gaelic comment and eye roll, attributing his surliness simply to annoyance that work had made its way into our home._

_The moments had taken on a new significance now_.)

“Well then.” Jamie’s voice was a voice a taut leather thing.  The cradle holding my phone ( _constructed by our tangled fingers_ ) broke as his hand fell from mine. “I guess we’ve no’ talked about what happened at the  _last_  party we went to.”

I did not need clarification, but then he added, “Before I left for California.”

I brushed my hair over my shoulder and dropped my mobile between us as I rose, shedding my robe.

“I dinna want ye hangin’ ‘round with him.”

_Him._

Though I was well aware, Jamie added, “Tom Christie.”

( _He said it so calmly.  Like he was brokering an introduction between business colleagues.  Tom Christie.  My mind hissed, ‘Tom-fucking-Christie.’_ )

My fingertips ran across the dress that I had worn to the gala the night before Jamie left for California. The deflated shadow of it on the hanger made my stomach knot. With no small amount of dramatic flair ( _and two glasses of rioja_ ), I had considered burning it that Sunday night after he left.  Emboldened by alcohol, it was a full-bodied manifestation of some of my husband’s stranger Highlander proclivities. Belief in the fantastic power of  ** _things_**  to hold  ** _memories_**. Crouched in front of the anemic fire glowing in the fireplace, I had fixated on the dress. And then fallen asleep with the dog in a headlock.

Blinking hard, I spoke into the hangers of our shared clothes rather than to him.  “You’re being horribly jealous.”

“I am,” he confirmed plainly.  

I had not expected his admission to be that easily extracted.  ( _Apparently post-California Jamie and Claire did not mince words._ )Bowing my head, I inhaled.  “I don’t know the way forward, Jamie.  I don’t know what I can say to you to make this better.”

“I dinna ken either.”

“Have you mentioned this to Denzell–”

“ _Stop_.” It played on his face like a war movie.  With his expression my vaguest suspicions of how he’d known Tom Christie were confirmed. ( _War.  Always that fucking war._ ) “I ken I dinna  _own_  ye, but ye’re my  _wife_ , Claire Fraser. I’ve some say in who ye spend yer time with, and I canna bear ye bein’ near him.”

I pulled a gauzy sweater from a hanger and reached for a shirt for him, letting my fingers linger at the collar.  Something was twisting in my guts like a flag whipping about its pole in the wind. This was no longer the delicate sprouting bud of a young love.  This was  _real_ , reedy. It was challenging. It was unlike a hundred other silly disagreements occurring appurtenant to a life woven together within the same four walls.  It would not be fixed by a sheepish look of apology over a homemade breakfast, a flower lazily plucked from a neighbor’s garden, or the thoughtful lapping of a contrite tongue between thighs ( _his or hers_ ).  

My mouth was careful with the sentiment as I said what I had needed to say since that night all those weeks earlier.  “I need you to trust me.  You can’t change who works with me.”

“Tom Christie’s a bad man, Claire. A dishonorable one.”

My brow furrowed as Jamie’s head bowed.  “I know you think that Tom’s–”

“–I dinna  _think_  anything, Claire. I  _ken_  what kind of man he is–”

“–don’t cut me off–”

“–Claire, I–”

“–just  _listen_ , you bloody stubborn man.”  

A breath.  An entire war between being  _right_ and being  _happy_  not mattering to me in the least as long as we were  _okay_  and we were  _together_.

“Will you  _listen_?”

I almost laughed at the show on his face ( _uncompromising, pig-headed man_ ) as he ground out, “Aye.”

Another breath.  

A third.

Dropping my clothes to the window seat next to our closet, I sat on the edge of the bed.  “Tom was inappropriate with me.” Darkness descended on his expression.  He started to shift away and apparently thought better of it as I pressed a single, careful finger over his lips.  “You promised to listen to me.”

From beneath the caged trap of my knuckles, he mumbled, “The man’s got an unnatural attraction to ye.”

“Jamie…”  

“It’s  _normal_  for such a thing to bother a man.” He furrowed his brows.  “To bother  _me_.”

I licked my lips.  They were chapped, aching.  “I’ve given you everything, James Fraser, and now I feel a little as though you don’t trust me.”

Though I did not want to give him an explanation, it felt necessary. With the slick, beating, bloody bag of his deflating heart in my hands, I could not help but to provide him with  _something_.

“I just  _work_  with him.  He has never tried anything.   _Ever_. You saw the extent of it that night.  You don’t trust him, fine.  I won’t talk you into trusting him, but trust  _me_. Trust your  _wife_.  Say you trust me.”

I needed to hear it, needed it to know that we were not broken.

“I  _do_  trust you,” he insisted plainly.  He paused at that, one hand coming to rest at the small of my back.  “I am the true home of your heart. I ken that well, Claire.  I dinna ken what more I can say to you on the subject.”

I could see the smeared evidence of my mouth’s earlier eagerness in bed. That insistence was blooming into a dusky hickey at the base of his throat.  I had marked him.  The thought made me smirk as I closed the distance between us, carefully insinuating myself on his lap.

A smile echoed across the stony expanse of his face for only a moment before he fit his hands to the curve of my waist. “I have loved others.  No’ women, mind you, in a romantic way, and never like you, but  _others_. And I do love many, Sassenach—but you alone hold all my heart, whole in your hands,” he said softly, thumbs stroking the fabric at my waist. “And ye ken that well.”

“The same goes for you, my lad,” I whispered, hoping that he knew it without me saying at it just as I had known that he had long past designated me the sole protector of his heart. “You have my whole heart.  You alone.”

“He put his hands on ye.  He sent ye an angel emoji.”

“An angel emoji. And now you sound like you’re pouting.”

“So what if I am?” he chuckled, hand tracing up my spine and expanding between my shoulderblades.  _God, he made me feel sheltered.  Protected.  Even like this, the tension cleaving a ditch between his brows.  Even when he was frustrated with me, with the world._

“He told me that there’s some sort of history between the two of you,” I confessed.  At the twitch in his jaw, I clarified, “Right before John called… before I knew that you had been hurt.”

“Och, weel.  Aye, but that’s a story for when there’s time.”

Though I had no interest in fighting with him, reliving every moment of our awful fight after the trials of the last weeks, I was readily able to call to mind the ugly words he spat at me. (“ _He wants ye and I’m tryin’ to riddle through whether ye want him as well._ ”) Something clenched inside of me there as my mind’s hardware recommitted the scent of him to memory.  “You made me doubt whether you trust me that night.”

He made a noise low in his throat, the rumble of a man disgusted with himself.  “I trust ye, Sorcha. I’ve said so tonight.  I’ll tell ye until ye believe it.  I am sorry that I ever made ye doubt it.”

I glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand.  “This conversation started at a completely inopportune time.”

“It needed to start,” he said simply, brushing my hair off of my shoulder.  “Now… we should  _coordinate_  for this party.”

The space between my brows crumpled like a discarded scrap of paper as he brought his mouth to the hollow beneath my throat.

“Ye dinna think that I canna feel the hickey ye gave me?”

And he set about making us into a matching pair.


	26. Part Twenty-Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A welcome back shindig and a coat closet. (;nsfw towards end)

**Loss (Act II)**

**Part Twenty-Six**

 

Though she wore flats, Laoghaire MacKenzie was on the very tips of her toes as she glided across the foyer of Andrew Wilson’s palatial home to greet us.  It was as if the soles of her feet had a misapprehension that the flooring was made of lava.The overloaded orthopedic surgeon side of my brain concluded that ( _quite glibly_ ) that her weekday footwear ( _towering, painful stilettos_ ) would cause her shoe-related foot pain in short order.

“Dr. Beauchamp, she started. An uninvited hand took my forearm.  Her manicured fingers squeezed and released, her eyes only meeting mine after traveling the length of my body.  “I’m glad you were able to make it.”

Then she turned to my husband.

“And Jamie…”

But for my husband’s humming as he wrangled his crutches into one fist, the cloudy sigh with which she breathed his name would have made me laugh. As I took a step towards him, Laoghaire moved between us and intercepted my path.

“Here, let me help you with yer jacket, Jamie…”

Her preternaturally pale blue eyes fogged over with the drowsy sensuality of silent film actress as he responded, “Aye, my thanks, lass.”

_Lass._

Setting her beer on the floor, Laoghaire gathered the fabric of his jacket ( _her small hands lacking the hesitancy of someone with a platonic intent, moving like the hands of a someone undressing their beloved_ ).

_For fucks sake._

Although I had rarely been one to dwell on the looks of another woman, I watched the scene unfold and noted that Laoghaire was pretty in a translucent, too pert kind of way.  In her early twenties ( _I supposed_ ), she still had the easy slenderness of a university student.  As she moved, the sheet of her moonbeam hair fell over her bared bronzed shoulders, creating a fair approximation of a halo around her.  Bare faced, she had the dewy, winter-flushed complexion of a teenager in a fast fashion television advertisement.

And her unrequited infatuation with my husband was apparent and almost violent.

He started to shrug off the jacket, and their hands collided in a traffic jam of fingers.

“Sorry, Laoghaire,” Jamie chuckled a little darkly.

Of course I’d heard him say her name before ( _on the phone in frustration on a day off, as a dismissive welcome at the firm’s previous get togethers before he joined another conversation, in passing while detailing the comings and goings of his day_ ), but something about the way he said it then made my stomach clench.

For her part, Laoghaire let rise a laugh from the delicate enclosure of her body. It was the laugh of a _woman_ with secrets as innumerable as the stars. ( _A woman certain in her power even if the plotlines of such secrets were stolen, living only as undefined amalgamations of the stories of other women._ )

Those _fucking fingers, her small palm_ were so near to the parts of him that supplied him life ( _lungs, heart_ ). The parts that we had fought to keep vibrant and pink, pulsating red with life.

Another woman freed my husband’s usually squared, sure shoulders of the fabric.  

I did not even bother trying to school my glass face into a passable expression as I slipped free from my own jacket ( _well-worn, vintage leather that smelled faintly of the previous owner and my own perfume_ ).

 _God he was awkward (not from the crutches, but from_ ** _her_** _, her nearness)_.   _And God I hated him for not noting the look of utter disdain on my face._

Stripped free of his winter things, Jamie had the good grace to give me an apologetic look as Laoghaire gathered his coat close to her chest.

“Really?” I asked as she turned, feeling the muscles in my temples draw taut.

He shrugged, finally clocking my mood.  His expression changed to one of mild bemusement. A look as if to say, _“see, see there that feeling? see how it swells and crashes, makes you irrationally annoyed?_ ”

“Watch carefully,” I stated dryly to Jamie, not bothering to see if Laoghaire was out of ear shot.  Part of me hoped she had ears as eager as her hands. “She might be trying to catch a whiff of your scent on that jacket.”

I did not bother waiting for his response ( _verbal or otherwise_ ).  Instead went to the closet ( _a space cavernous enough to fit the entirety of my kitchen_ ) to hang my own jacket and handbag.  Laoghaire’s fingers lingered on his collar, adjusting it to sit neatly on the hanger.   _That collar_. Where his untellable secrets lingered. ( _The hint of cigar smoke that I never asked him about because I knew he would lie to me. The smudge of my lipstick from the darting drunken kiss I had given him on New Years Eve 2017 that had been the nemesis of our drycleaner. A long auburn dog hair not plucked by his usually meticulous fingers. The microscopic crumb of a hastily-eaten chip from his favorite kebab stand in Glasgow._ )

“Vintage?” Laoghaire said by way of question, eyeing me as I slipped my jacket onto a bamboo hanger.

A bit ruefully, I concluded that the mere existence of the garment was a challenge to _her_. ( _To Laoghaire_. _Its history._ ) Carefully brushing my knuckles down the length of leather, I nodded before shooting a look over my shoulder. “ _He_ picked it out.”

( _The comment flitted across her eyes only for a moment, but my remark had dual benefits: interrupting her agenda and being true._

_The camel leather had been rescued from a bin of despondent, mottled overcoats at a flea market in Paris. We were on an impromptu visit for Bastille Day._

_God, we were new then._

_We were young._

_And we were still negotiating one another’s contours._

_It was infernally hot that day notwithstanding the whisper-thin awning whipping over our heads. Jamie had the pale pink crescents of a nascent sunburn along the tops of his well-formed cheekbones. Smiling a lazy smile, he zipped me into the sun-gooey leather. He smelled like musk, my chewing gum, and sunshine. The determined look on his face made me wonder if the lines of him would taste the same – salted sunbeams, the tang of atmosphere itself._

_The night before I had wrapped around him in the hotel bath, periodically turning the tap with my toes to warm the tepid water. Submerged, we shared hidden bits of ourselves. That morning, our fingers were no longer wrinkled from the soaking, but our limbs had not forgotten the muscle memory of the way I had carefully shrouded him from the tumult of fireworks and gunpowder outside._

_After breakfast in bed, among the bins of strangers’ forgotten memories, Jamie backed away from the ledge of his own memories. Fingertips lingering on the zipper tab, he commented. “I’ve always wanted a biker chick.”_

_He licked his lips, and I kissed him before his tongue was back behind his teeth. Into his mouth, I whispered, “I’ve always wanted_ ** _you_** _.”_ )  

Drams of pre-dinner whisky gave way to a plated meal.

Somehow Laoghaire managed to insinuate herself between a couple and sat directly across from us.  For the most part, we managed to avoid much in the way of direct interaction. The conversation instead focused around Jamie’s return to the office.  ( _The athletic shoe campaign that had floundered as his firm blindly searched for direction in his absence.  The ripple effect of his dark office had on any number of other clients who asked after him regularly.Jamie’s disingenuous statement, cloaked in an uncharacteristic level of machismo, that it “was no’ more than a tumble; it wasna sae bad.”  How much regret Andrew had over what he characterized “the whole ordeal” while refusing to meet my eye._ )

For my part, I drank wine.

I pushed limp salad around my plate.

I ate the Chilean sea bass without tasting much of anything.

And I chewed my lower lip ( _thinking, calculating while my cheeks warmed with alcohol_ ).

After wait staff served a pudding course ( _too-warm plates of cherry clafoutis_ ), I could not help my semi-drunken smirk when Jamie turned his attention to me as the polite inquiries over his injury faded away ( _stocks, bonds, “the market,” and the discourse of rich folks becoming the new focus_ ).  Reaching up, he pressed a thumb to the corner of my mouth.  “Wee bit of icing sugar on yer lip.”

I let my tongue dart out and purposefully fluttered my eyelashes.  “Did I get it?”

_I could feel her watching us, and my imagination took great solace in her own complexion pinking beneath a flush._

“Dinna start,” he mumbled, licking his thumb ( _a start of his own_ ) before taking a bite of his own dessert.

“Or what?” I asked, dabbing my finger in the delicate dusting of sugar on my plate.  

Ignoring my question, he tipped his head towards my uneaten pastry. His eyes did not stray from me.  “Ye dinna like it, do ye?”

Cranking my accent up to a full affectation, I crooned, “Wot’s that then?”

“ _Me_.”  His eyes were positively sparkling, the bastard. “Ye dinna like that I have a flirty coworker.”

“ _Hate_ it,” I muttered, feeling any instinct to turn the other cheek dissolve.

“Aye, but ye’re a _woman_ , Claire.   _My_ woman, and I need _you_.”  Our eye contact broke for a moment, his attention scattering like marbles. First to Laoghaire and then to the decanter of amber whisky that had been brought out with the clafoutis. He poured a healthy measure, sipped, clouded in his own thoughts, and continued. “I dinna need a _lassie_.  Laoghaire’ll be a girl until she’s fifty.”

I stabbed a fork through the drum-tight skin of a particularly juicy cherry and watched the syrup bubble out around the tines.

“Can ye see it now?” he asked, his tone a tumble-polished stone, unadorned and smooth. “Why I care about it? About Christie.”

“Yes.”  A whisper as I bent, the stalk of my resolve curving to meet the pressure of the wind. I looked away from the cherry, setting my fork down on the edge of my plate. “But I also trust that you’d never… _indulge_.  So can _you_ see it now? Where _I_ am coming from?”

“I can.  And I trust ye just as ye trust me, my Sassenach.”  My heart, filling with his words, was uncontained, hammering against my ribs, my sternum.  

“Laoghaire MacKenzie is a flirt,” I started steadily. “And Tom Christie is a flirt. Perhaps the latter has a more sinister intent, but I’m married to _you_.”  

Inhaling, pausing, watching his face, searching for any sign that I was getting through to him, of concession, of _understanding_. I reached across his body to take the tumbler of whisky from his hand.  

I exhaled.  

I whispered, “For better or for worse.”

“Aye, for better or worse, and ye’ve endured no small version of ‘ _worse_ ’ these last months.”  

Under the table, Jamie squeezed my leg ( _sure and firm, a tether to ground me when I was about to float away_ ).

I couldn’t muster a response.  

To accept it would be to call to the forefront of our minds the _worse_.

( _Mornings of reading reports about the proteins in his urine. Afternoons where my main purpose was to keep breathing until he was out of surgery, removing scuffs from tile with the toe of my tennis shoe. Waiting.  Waiting.Waiting.Evenings in that too-cool bungalow.The one where he told me that we needed to wait for a baby, when I selfishly wanted to scream that we had already done so much waiting_.)

To deny it would be to lie.

( _Some hardships earned a cast of humor over time.  On this particular matter, we would never look back and laugh._ )

He cleared his throat, looked down at where his hand rested on my thigh.  

And then he spoke.

“Sometimes I worry that we love each other too much. It makes us irrational.”

Blinking hard ( _at the crack in his voice, his words, the furrow between his brows_ ), I tried to stop the swirl at the back of my skull, to identify some words sufficient to reciprocate that sentiment ( _somewhat twisted as it was_ ).

“Our love makes us _daft_ ,” he finished, “to use yer word.”

“Hey there, Jamie,” Laoghaire called, the sharp lilt of her voice setting my teeth on edge.  I lifted the glass and tipped my head back, let the whisky burn down my throat and coat my insides.

“Dinna go from me,” he whispered, his thumb pressing into my flesh, searing hot like a brand.  “Dinna let this moment get away.No’ for her. No’ for anyone.”

I sucked in a thin stream of breath, searching for his hand and winding our fingers together.

Then the world around us disappeared.

( _Syllables of shop talk dissolved even though Jamie’s colleagues continued to drone on at a useless whirl._

_Laoghaire’s fat eyelashes beat-beat-beating against her preternaturally well-formed cheekbones disappeared as a curtain descended over my peripheral vision._

_Half a dozen squealing housewives, exclaiming their enamoration over the too tart, out-of-season cherry pudding course, formed a harmonoious hum with the disassembled consonants of the advertisers’ patois._

_Us._

_Only us._ )

“I trust ye, Claire.”

Some haunted part of him knew.   _Just knew_ that I needed to hear it again, without the fire of an impending argument.  Without me asking. 

Those lips that had kissed me to sleep on a hundred nights, that would kiss me awake on thousands of mornings, were shaped like a gospel.  

And when he spoke, they let free only truth. “Just as ye trust me.”

“If I cry at this dinner table I’ll kill you,” I whispered, feeling the salinated prickliness of a good cry in my tear ducts.

I snuffled when he said, “We canna have that.”

“Say something awful,” I pleaded, only half joking.

Giving me an obliging once over, he lowered his voice as he leaned close.  His breath was warm on my ear as he breathed, “Eat yer fancy French pastry so yer ass fills yer jeans out properly again.”

“That’s the ticket.”    


“I need somethin’ to grab when ye cry out my name.”

A barking laugh ( _mine_ ) was all it took to penetrate the protective layer that we had built together as we ascended into our own stratosphere.  The formerly greyed out edges of the real world took on color and faded back into focus.

Coming to, I realized that Laoghaire had shed her shawl and was leaning on the table with her breasts pressed together to their full advantage.  I unwound our hands and reached for the decanter, over filling the glass. 

“Do you think she’ll try to tie a cherry stem with her tongue for you before the night’s over?”

Jamie shook his head, the easy quirk of his mouth and creep of his hand millimeters north giving me a quick, quiet thrill.  “Now ye’re just being petty, _Beecham_.”

Scoffing, I parroted the accusation back at him, shaking my head.  “You don’t even _know_ petty, my lad.”

As the night wore on, Jamie was harangued by his colleagues ( _and one moonbeam pool-eyed waif_ ) into a game of billiards.  The match was buttressed by not insignificant wagers with his colleagues ( _though with a warm hand pressed against the small of my back Jamie promised not to lose more than a few hundred pounds, a sum that made my tongue go dry_ ).

To save ourselves even the budding threat of a spat over _her_ of all things, I invested wholly in a conversation with Andrew Wilson’s stepson ( _Elias_ ) about medical school. He was a bright kid.  A self-described introvert who glowedan almost radioactive glee when discussing his organic chemistry coursework. In short, he was a lad after my own heart.  

We were only just delving into my hard sales pitch for surgery as a specialty when I heard something that made my body go molten and my heart freeze.

“Jamie! _My_ ** _lad_**!”

_My lad._ **_That_ ** _one was mine._

With her pool cute in both hands, Laoghaire was gesticulating wildly to where Jamie had apparently made some noteworthy shot ( _or perhaps had just continued to breathe in her general vicinity_ ).  Slowly, Jamie pulled himself up to full height and had the good grace to look at me rather than turn his attention to Laoghaire.  He shook his head blandly as though to call me off or to remind me of what we had said back overt tart cherries and whisky.

But I was already on my feet.  

‘ _It’s fine_ ,’ he mouthed, casting a look at Laoghaire that would have chilled any sensible woman to her very core.  

But not Laoghaire MacKenzie. She only laughed, “Ye’re a pool shark!”

 _Oh for fucks sake_.

Jamie shook his head again and bent to make his next shot.

“Elias, if you’ll excuse me…”

Without a backward glance, I went to the washroom.  For a moment I stood in front of the most awkwardly-placed full-length mirror I had ever seen ( _right in front of the toilet!_ ), assessing the dishevelment of my soft-simmering annoyance. My next step had not yet become apparent to me as I yanked my jeans and knickers down to my ankles and sat on the toilet.  

But then I stood, fighting to get my back over the bee-stung hump of my arse ( _announcing rather anticlimactically to the empty loo that Jamie was full of shit with his ongoing comments about said body part’s failure to bounce back to pre-California shape_ ), and it came to me.

Jeans back down, I stripped off my boots and executed my plan.

While I had been otherwise disposed, someone had turned up the music. Jamie was standing in a small group of his colleagues, and for a moment I second guessed what I was about to do.  

_No._

_I was Claire Beauchamp.  Wife.Sexpot.Not jealous, just appropriately annoyed.  And I was going to piss on my territory._

“Can I interrupt?” I asked, casting an apologetic look at his colleagues.  Andrew Wilson, having tangled with me once before, held up his hands as if to say “ _by all means_ ” and turned only slightly.  I offered a conciliatory smile, slipping my hand into my pocket.  The postage-stamp of my mint green lace panties contained in the ironclad enclosure of my fist, I slipped my hand into the front pocket of his jeans. ‘ _My lad_ ,’ I thought ruefully as I turned from my husband’s face ( _a scramble of confusion and worry_ ) and glanced to Laoghaire who was looking at us with no small amount of consternation.

He gave me a curious look, his hand dipping into his pocket. “I dinna ken what ye’re–”

As his face blanched, and I gave him my most dazzling, meaningful smile with my hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t take the nine o’clock dose. You need to be more careful.”

And with that, I turned heel and returned to Elias to resume our discussion about the rigors of a medical education.

Eight minutes later, I found myself in that monstrously large coat closet with my back against a wall of other people’s coats and Jamie’s hands up my shirt.

“Ye fuckin’ tease,” he groaned as I loosened his belt and started to toy with the button on his jeans.  

“Me?”

With a quick nip that made me groan, he confirmed, “You.”

“You have no idea,” I mumbled, my efforts to drag down his zipper interrupted as one rough hand made its way between my thighs.

Hot, whisky cherry bloomed against my ear and over my face as his fingers curved.  “I ken pretty well what ye’re up to.Wi’out yer knickers, completely shameless.”

“I thought you liked it–”

–his hand was moving, I caught my breath ( _oh_ ), sucked in more and more, tried to exhale ( _failed_ )–

“–that last round of truth or dare at the restaurant, you–”

–the friction he created was so firm, so intentional that I let out a particularly lewd noise –

“–you… you...”

“I _what_ , Sassenach?”

I shook my head, as if the gauzy arousal there would lift ( _it did, albeit mildly_ ).  Grinding back onto his hand, I regained a modicum of my sensibilities with the slightly uncomfortable sharpness of the seam of my jeans more apparent. “ _You_ dared me to take off my knickers and give them to you when we finished eating dinner.”

He confirmed with unintelligible syllables, grunting as my hand slipped into the front of his boxer briefs and I took his cock into my hand. His motions became distracted. They lost rhythm, slowed, slackened.

 _I was back in the driver’s seat_.

“I thought it was a _kink_ , soldier.  Pantyless wife in public, hot for you.”

“No.”  Between a muttered hiss of _fuck_ and _we shouldn’t_ , he managed, “ _You.  Ye’re my kink, a nighean_.”

Playing coy, I made a small noise of surprise.

He pressed me further back into the sea of coats, and I started to laugh my feet lost purchase.  He was being rough with me ( _uncalculated, lips parted slightly, his breath ragged, his hair falling forward_ ). Rough in the gratifying way he had when he was ready to _take_ more than _give_.  Rougher than he’d been since his accident.  Like when he was ready to abandon himself, to devolve, to offer the constituent pieces of himself to me.  

“Only you make me feel like this.”

“Like what?”  

“ _Wild_.”

I hummed, carding a hand into his hair as I removed the hand from the front of his jeans, ran my tongue over my palm.  I dipped my hand back to where it belonged ( _always_ ), and asked, “How so?”

“ _Ifrinn_ , Claire. Like I could fuck in a coat closet at my boss’s house and no’ care who sees, who hears.”

“Bolt the door,” I invited him, quirking an eyebrow.

“It’s a fucking _coat closet, Claire_ ,” he hissed. “There isna a _bolt_ on the _fucking_ _door_.”

I stilled my hand, feigning confusion.  “No bolt?”

He shook his head, appearing at least somewhat crazed. Then, the slightest squeeze unleashed a torrent of profanity like I’d never heard from him before.  Laughing, I slipped my fingers free of his jeans and stepped back. 

“Fuck.”  

Straightening my top, I adopted a sing-song tone reserved for teasing him about things like the grey hair he found south of his navel or the way he snored himself awake when he fell asleep sitting up. “Such a shame.”

“We’re leavin’.”  It was not a question as he fastened his belt, shifted in his jeans.

“Are you drunk?”

He shook his head.  “Ye’ve had too much to drink, but I’ve not.  Let’s go home.”

“Leaving?” I asked, knitting my brows together.  “But I was just helping Andrew’s kid figure out a plan for university and–”

“I’m going to take ye home now. I want ye to make me say, ‘Oh, God,’ for ye.”

“That… could be arranged.”  I smoothed down the front of my shirt, letting him slip the leather jacket that had started it all over my shoulders.  I had cooled down slightly, but not enough.The last five minutes had lit me like a candle, and no small part of me had started to wonder if I would be able to wait the drive home.

“Good,” he said.  “And then I’ll see what I can make _you_ say, mo nighean donn.”

Zipping my jacket all the way to the top and shoving my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans, I smiled.  “See if you can make me say, ‘Don’t stop.’”


	27. Part Twenty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little less than a year ago I mentioned to Tat (sassenachwaffles) and Kristin (kkruml) that I wanted to try something different for Act II of Loss.  I had no idea then how much emotionally exhausting work would go into writing this.  Here we are, with them dragging me across the finish line.  Between the ficlets, Act I, and this last part of Act II, I have written almost a quarter of a million words about this version of Jamie and Claire.  Thank you to everyone who loves them as much as I do.  I hope this is a good way to send off this act. 💜 
> 
> Act III is in the early planning stages and will be out sometime this summer or early autumn.  There will, of course, be ficlets in between. 
> 
> Without further ado, here’s the last bit of Act II.

 

##  **LOSS (ACT II)  
** **PART TWENTY-SEVEN**

Together we smelled like a family.

( _The scent of us emanated from common places.  Our things in closets.  Our rain-damp shoes in neat rows by the front door.  Our shapes molded into the couch cushions.  Our fingerprints on one another’s flesh.  Our small sounds as the white noise at bedtime._ )

It was a Thursday night.  I was done with work for the week and drifting further and further from sleep with one leg dangling free of the bed linens.  

It would be a night of wakefulness.

However, instead of counting sheep or clearing my mind of the happenings of my day, I tallied the things that I had to accomplish before Maggie was entrusted to our care for the weekend.

( _Our niece. Oh… I had a niece, a primer for the care of a small human of our own… I hoped_ ).

I focused my attention on the shadowed notch in the ceiling above my head. The abstract indented shape was a result of an inebriated defrocking shortly after we moved in. ( _His belt buckle had made acquaintance with the ceiling as I enthusiastically ripped the belt off of my soon-to-be husband. He was properly bemused, and luckily the plaster was the only casualty, not one of his eyeballs._ )

It was long past rain-sodden, velvet midnight ( _just as I started to mentally prepare a list of Maggie’s birthday treats_ ) when Jamie told me without much of a prelude at all.

( _It was the time of the night that he regularly chose for his quieted, secreted, sacred confessions._

 _The first “I need you,” the seminal “I love you,” the proposal that made the melting together of our lives permanent._ )

He had been so quiet that Thursday night. So still that I had not realized that he was even awake.

A little startled at his saying of my name ( _my Christian one_ ), I jumped and turned to my side to look at him.  He was fixated on the ceiling ( _perhaps at that same clean-carved, belt buckle-shaped void in the ceiling_ ).

“We were in Afghanistan together.”  

His hand rose and fell slowly on his stomach, like an anchor to keep his body from floating up, up, up, and away.  

“It seems a small thing now that I say it out loud, but he was a pretentious son of a bitch.  Eight months we served together that last deployment.  Those local kids, the ones who spoke Farsi and who we were supposed to train, were so excited to learn English and teach us. Weel, Christie wouldna let a word of Farsi pass his lips.  Christ, no.  ‘Barbarous tongue’ he called it.”

Jamie turned to face me.  I hated him like this – cryptic – but knew well enough not to stop him, not to ask for more when what he was giving was hollowing him out to his very core. He reached for the pendant at my throat and began to roll it about between his fingers.

“Christie was one of our commanding officers and a total cad.” He touch tightened on the necklace, the chain biting into the fleshy soft parts of my throat. It was a low, muttered thing when he said, “Frigging Sassenach.”  I must have blanched because the line of a lopsided smile touched his lips and faded just as quickly as he clarified, “I didna mean  _you_ , of course.”

“Of course not.”

He hummed, low in his throat and continued only for his words to blanch, to fall away. “She was…”

The line of his throat dipped as his voice failed.  I slipped closer, turning onto my side and insinuating myself against his flank. “She was what?”

“She was training  _us_  to train  _them_ … the people who’d be in charge when we left. Mina Alcott. That was her name.  I hadna thought of it for at least a year before that night at yer gala. Christie and Mina knew each other from before we were there in Afghanistan.”  

I carefully placed my hand over the center of his chest.  His heart was a manic, galloping thing.  As I suspected, contrary to his even breathing and tone, fury was bubbling in him.  ( _Rampant.  Hot.  Uncontrolled. A searing red anger that had swollen after a long dormancy, but not yet reached the limit in which it would infect his voice._ )

“She had a ring.  She was married.  The both of them were married. We all kent it, and he was carrying on wi’ her.  Flirtin’.  Moonin’ about over her.  Takin’ her to his bed.  Actin’ like the rest of us were blind or fucking stupid.”  

The combination of shadowed night and his resolve to stay even keel made his expression impassive.  I remained as still as possible, on high alert as he rolled my necklace between his almost-healed fingers.  ( _I listened to what was and what wasn’t then.  The cadence of his too-controlled breathing.  The rustle of bed sheets as he adjusted to draw closer to me, to insinuate himself in my space as though he was not always everywhere to me.  The spaces between words that expressed as much, if not more, than the things he said._ )

“He was no’ wi’ us that day that we were attacked, ye ken.  He was–”

–finally, a true break in his voice, gravity becoming a drag on his tone–

“– _sick_ that day.  Ye canna even call it a hangover when ye’re still too pissed from the night before to do yer duty.  I didna see her when it happened, when we hit the IED. But she was ripped apart.  Dead, smeared into the dust on that street and scattered over two city blocks.  Like so many of the others.”

Jamie swallowed, his hand going flat over the center of my chest ( _a mirror to the way I was touching him_ ).  He closed his eyes.  I knew his touch so intimately that the arches and whorls of his fingerprints were familiar to me, as was the meaning of the slight tremor and flick in his knuckle as he tried his damnedest to stay still.  

He was reliving it.

I had seen this in him enough to know what the pause meant, what the tremor masked.  

An active theater existed in his mind. With actors in fatigues and faces of people he had known before.

 _Another life_.

And when that theater played, it unleashed a barrage of sense memories ( _sight, scent, touch, taste, sound_ ) enough to make his eyes go foggy.  A series of moments ( _his body bowed and tight, his bared bicep twitching as it drew taut_ ), and then, “There was an inquest, ye ken.”  

The thickening of his accent, the curl of his words into one another made me draw myself closer, as though I was not always everywhere to him.  

“They wanted to ken what happened to us.  _Why_  it happened.  As if there’s a  _reason_  any of us could’ve given for why someone wanted to kill all of us. I mean other than, ‘ _it’s a fucking war_.’  I’ve no’ seen the final report, but the findings made their way around. Gossip. Men talk.”

As he swallowed, the poison of the story turned down the corners of his mouth.

My guts were at war with my mouth, the instincts to urge him to keep going and to stop equally as strong.  

‘ _Say, say, say_ ,’ I wanted to breathe into his mouth as I curled around him, to swallow his consonants and vowels. To let them fill my chest, to see a piece of him.  To take it on and give him some kind of shelter ( _shelter from what though? himself? the demons in his own mind?_ ).  

The urge to pour into our space a plea to stop was equally as strong, my mind able to picture what it would be like to whisper between his awaiting lips. (‘ _It’s okay, don’t. I don’t need to know. He is nothing. We are everything._ ’)

“Christie  _lied_  about Mina Alcott. About his relationship wi’ her, like it was nothing.  At the end of the day it had nothing to do wi’ what happened on that road, wi’ her dyin’, but it’s all wrapped up together in my head, ye ken? I canna separate it. Him lyin’ about what he was to her.  Him not bein’ there for his soldiers.  Him goin’ back to a perfect life wi’out a second thought.”

His mouth went slack with the telling of it, as though he felt surprise that he said it aloud.  Maybe he never had said it aloud, letting it brew in his stomach until that night at the gala when instead of saying  _this_  he said what he said to me.

“Christie retired from service after that.  Went home to his wife, pretended nothing happened from what I hear until she passed.  Thirty-nine. Cancer, at least that’s what I heard.  I pray to God she never kent what he was, never had reason to ken.”

“Jamie, I–”

“–ye dinna need to say anything, Claire.”

“But–”

“–I thought that ye should ken why I hate the man and why I said what I said.  It’s a jumble of thoughts, I ken, but I just canna stand the man.  He’s a liar.  A cheater.  A deserter.”

I lifted his hand off my chest. The imprint of warmth left by his fingers chilled from the outside in until his touch was only a memory.  I kissed his palm, the heel of his hand, let my lips linger on his pulse point.  He moved closer, his face slipping into the small bit of moonlight making its way through the slit between our blackout curtains.

“Denzell Hunter told me to tell ye.  Now’s no’ the right time, in the middle of the night, but I–”

“–it  _is_ , Jamie. It’s the right time.”

He made a low sound of approval, drawing me against his chest and settling his hands against my lower back. He inhaled with his face nestled into my bed-messed hair.  He exhaled and breathed in again.  _I smelled like home to him._  Tense lips kissed my crown and slurred an endearment in Gaelic as he tightened his hold on me.

After a time, his heartbeat evened, his lips slackened, and he released the soft snores that always escaped him in his first few minutes of slumber.

_He was unburdened and soft in the light._

I did not sleep again until he kissed me on the forehead in the morning before he rose to get ready for work.

Ian delivered Maggie at 4:00 p.m. that Friday afternoon.

Eyes wide and with a pouty lower lip on full display, Maggie stared at me from the doorway like I was a complete stranger. I imagined that in the entryway of our home she was thinking twice about her request to spend her birthday weekend with her old Auntie Claire and Uncle Jamie. Gathering up her backpack and tightly-rolled sleeping bag, I gave her the kind of look ( _tentative skepticism tempered by confusion_ ) that no one even marginally adept at handling a child would offer.

“Better be careful of yer lip,” Ian started, smoothing a hand over her ponytail.  “A bird’ll come by and take a grand ol’ shite on it.”

“ _Dad_ ,” she groaned before stomping off to the couch and laying herself heavily against Buffalo Bill. The dog only harrumphed his discontent and adjusting his blocky head into her lap.

“She’s nervous,” Ian explained quietly, checking the flashing screen on his cell phone. “She’s worrit about Jamie.  She’s no’ been able to stop herself from asking after him since it happened.”

The declaration took me aback.   _Of course_  a child who loved him would be worried.   _Of course_ she would ask questions.  And neither Jamie nor I had even the slightest inclination to call and talk to her about it directly.

I could have said “I’m sorry” to Ian straight away.  I could have asked what I should say to a scared little human, but instead I babbled.

“He’s getting by.  Making strides everyday.  He’s the most well-disciplined patient I’ve ever seen when it comes to physical therapy and following recommendations.”  I dried my palms on my jeans, lips pursed. While we had made regular calls to Jenny and Ian while in California, our arrival home had let me hibernate in a place where I hadn’t thought that others would continue to worry.  “I’m sorry that she–”

“Dinna fash, Claire.  She is worrit, but she couldna stop talkin’ about this weekend,  _about you_  – a mile a minute, that one – the entire ride here. But now she’s  _nervous_.”

I cast a glance to her.  She had my iPad in hand and was scrolling through my music.  “We are going to show her a good time. And if we’re too boring and old, she has the dog and we have Netflix.”  

After giving me a brief nod and a squeeze of the shoulder, Ian strode across the living room to his daughter who was firmly immersed in my Spotify playlists.  She barely budged as Ian said goodbye to her and encouraged her to “ _mind yer auntie and uncle_.” As she folded her arms around his middle in the most cursory and faint imitation of a real embrace, I laughed behind my hand.

And then I was alone with her.

“What do you want to do?”

She offered a bland shrug, eyes fixed firmly on the iPad.  “Where’s my Uncle Jamie?”

“He isn’t home yet.” I silently willed her not to go into the app containing photographs.  I was fairly certain anything even mildly scandalous was under a passcode. However, I had the gut-riling premonition of what it would be like not only to explain where babies came from to eight-year-old Maggie Murray, but also what it would be like to seek the penance of said child’s angry mother. Thankfully, Maggie hit the lock button on the iPad and dropped it to the couch.  My stomach unclenched.  

Her facial expression ( _quirked eyebrows, tight mouth but a twitching upper lip_ ) seemed improbable to me in its absurdity.  Until that moment I had been fairly convinced that the capacity to turn such a face existed only in girls aged sixteen or older. Not in my darling niece who slept through Christmas Eve mass and had constantly-sticky fingers. Slightly taken aback, I supplied blandly, “Jamie has physical therapy after work.”

She crossed her legs, looking at me with what I imagined was her best impression of an adult about to have a serious conversation.  “My mam said that he almost died in America.  I wasna supposed to hear, but I did.”  

For a moment, my breath was taken away.  Over a year earlier she had confronted me with a similar adult question based on something she had overheard her mother say, but it had been less grave.  She had asked when Jamie and I would get married, stopping my heart when she divulged a bit of gossip that Jamie already had a ring and was going to make me an honest woman.  

Maggie pushed through the pleasant morass of my reverie, asking, “Is that true then?”

The question made me sick in my stomach, but I couldn’t refuse her an answer.  The answer was an easy “ _yes_ ,” but the half moon of my teeth sinking into the flesh of my tongue stopped it from coming out.  Instead, I measured my words with the precision of a baker.  “Jamie got pretty banged up in a fall, but he’s doing really well now.  He might be a little slower than usual, but he’ll be okay.”

“How do ye ken that he’ll be  _okay_?” she countered, eyes narrowing as she approximated my accent with a shocking level of precision. I raised my eyebrows, feeling as though I were back in California at that nurse’s station reading labs, progress notes, and orders. “I mean, how do ye ken he’ll be okay?”

Informed only by snippets of conversations gleaned thirdhand and a child’s sudden recognition of the meaning of  _death_ , she was scared of what had come of her uncle.  I studied her for a long moment, and then said, “Because I’m a  _doctor_ , Maggie.”

She hummed ( _a sound stamped bred in the DNA of a Fraser more than Murray_ ) and shrugged.  “Ye’re also marrit to him.”

“I am.”  Exhaling a relieved sigh, I carded a hand through my curls.  Jenny had joked in a text that for her eighth birthday Maggie was testing out what it meant to be a pre-teen.  But  _this_  wasn’t what I had expected upon her arrival.

“Will he be home later?”

“Of course he will.  He wouldn’t miss your birthday weekend.  We’re going to make pizzas for dinner.”

“Once he said ye dinna ken how to cook.”

I snorted a laugh and shrugged, feeling the mood change.  “He wasn’t wrong.”

“Even if ye canna cook, I’m glad that ye’re his wife, Auntie Claire.  So ye can take care of my Uncle Jamie.”  She paused, drawing her feet under her small body. “And so I can spend my birthday with ye of course.”

“I’m glad for that, too, Mags.”

We were sitting cross legged on the floor pawing through my meager collection of nail polishes and listening to Ariana Grande ( _I will maintain that it was her choice of music, not mine_ ) when Jamie came home.  Maggie had painted my toenails a bruise-purple and selected for herself a blood red polish. I imagined the color choice would leady the Murrays to conclude that the Frasers were not appropriate caretakers of their still-growing brood.  

“Are my lasses here?”

“Living room, Uncle Jamie!” Maggie called, rising to her feet with a child’s easiness ( _one that made me reflect for the days of joints that moved easily_ ) and bounding across the living room in her stocking feet.

“What are ye up to?” he asked from behind me as I bent forward to inspect a smear of polish across the soft swell of my big toe.  

“We just did one another’s toenails.  Want me to paint your toes, my lad?”

“Ye ken that I wouldna say ‘no’ to a pedicure from ye.”  

Finding a pre-soaked acetone pad at the bottom of my makeup bag and using the hem of my t-shirt to remove the dusty coating of a busted bronzer from it, I held it up as I turned.  “Glitter would suit you.”

I would like to think that I am someone with a good memory.  

Science in its certainty.

Medicine with its mix of science and magic.

Magic and the sensations it brings.  

But at the end of all things, most of the particulars of that moment will evade me forever other than a few simple observations.

My gasp, the last operation of my lungs for a few moments.

My stomach free falling while my heart hammered wildly.

And then the recognition of what I was seeing.

Jamie standing there.

Maggie on his back.

His bare feet firmly planted on the floor.

No crutches.

No braces.

No furrow in his brow where untold pain dwelt.

Just my husband, particularly curious over some glittery nail polish, and my niece.

Healthy.

Strong.

“Do ye think glitter suits me, Mags?” Jamie asked, taking two even, sure steps towards me.  “Or is yer auntie bein’ a fool?”

I tried to say his name, to say  _anything at all_ , and failed utterly.

Maggie supplied a thoughtful hum before concluding that sparkles  _indeed_ suited her Uncle Jamie. He hitched her higher on his back, the maneuver coming easily to him like any of the dozens of times he’d done it before.

“C’mon, Sassenach, let’s go make the birthday girl some pizzas.”

Like it was nothing, he turned and made his way into the kitchen.

I waited until they were through the threshold of the kitchen before starting to weep.  

The music got louder as they banged about in the kitchen, and I was in a frenzy trying to mop tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand.  After a few minutes he reappeared with a smile on his face that rivaled the one he’d had for me the day we married.

He took up most of the doorframe, his hands on the trim overhead as he leaned forward, the edge of his t-shirt riding up to expose a sliver of his stomach.  He looked smug, sexy, and at ease.  Like this was not some monumental moment in our story.  As if this was a normal Friday night.

“Maggie’s apparently fixated herself on a comment I made  _years_  ago before ye even met her, and she thinks that I was bein’ mean. Will ye come show her what an unmitigated disaster ye are in the kitchen?”

“Can you come here?” I managed, using the neck of my t-shirt to wipe away what I assumed was a mascara-colored collection of tears.

And he strode to me then.  ( _Effortless_.)  

“Am I dreaming?” I asked, my eyes fixed his jeans-clad thigh.

I was certain that I would wake up at any moment.  That the night before had been a hallucination. That I had imagined the story that he had told me.  That we had both fallen asleep.  That this was a technicolor figment of my wandering mind in the deepest recesses of sleep where dreams suspend and instead become graphic depictions of  _hope_.

He reached a hand out to me and helped lift me to my feet.

After his accident, he had divulged a series of hallucinations to me.  That I had come to him in the desert, touched him, kissed him, appeared almost perfect.  The sensation of questioning dreams versus reality was disconcerting, and I managed only to dumbly shake my head.

“No, ye’re no’ dreamin’ it.  The crutches are gone.”

He kissed my right cheek and then the left.  

The tip of my nose.  

The space between my eyebrows.  

My chin.  

Then he licked his lips, took my face, and kissed my slightly agape mouth. He exhaled into that same mouth.

“I’m real.  Ye’re real.”  

I held his forearms as I rose onto my tiptoes to kiss him again.  

Before my mouth could close over his, he whispered, “We made it through the winter.”

And then he kissed me like nothing hurt.

He kissed me like a teenager to whom kisses feel infinite, but with the skills of a man who knows a woman as well as she knows herself.

He kissed me as though the exquisite ache wrought by the night before he left had finally gone.  

Against mine, his lips wrote a promise untainted by our row the night before he left for California. His tongue parted my lips in a way that was devoid of the desperation of near loss or the need to prove a point ( _that he could, that we belonged to each other, that our story was not ever yet_ ).  He kissed me in a way that slowed down time, but reanimated the parts of ourselves that had been in hibernation.

He kissed me just for the sake of kissing me – nothing more, nothing less.

As his thumbs went electric, tracing the shape of my face, my hands roamed in a search for a sign of that we were dwelling in one another’s dreams still. For a sign that the union of his reformed bones had not yet been completed.  That the scar tissue that held inside the parts of him meant to be unseen was somehow still growing.

My hands mapped him ( _the ridge elbows, surging weight of his biceps, the firm peak of his shoulders, the well-formed caucuses of his shoulders, and down ridged terrain of his scarred back_ ), and came to rest at his lower back.

This was not a dream.

And some part of my body ( _belly, chest, mouth, or brain_ ) drafted a moan that he accepted with a curved, eager smile before his teeth scored my lower lip.  My legs and feet and spine were shivering, useless things that made me lean into him.  He pulled back lazily, my lips tingling and swelling from his mouth. “Ye taste good.”

His hands strayed to my waist as our lips parted.  

He just held me then.

And we were well and truly still as we exhaled the past months.  

It was then that I realized his scar tissue and reformed bones were not just holding  _him_  together.  Of course we were bound legally by marriage, but now our very bones had grown together.

“Uncle Jamie?” Maggie called, somewhat tentatively from the kitchen.  “Can Buffalo Bill eat basil?”

Jamie barked a quiet laugh along the part in my hair as I groaned.

“We’ll resume this…” his voice faded as he pulled back, looking down at me.

“Conversation?” I supplied blandly, licking the taste of him from my lips.

“Aye, conversation…  _later_.”

Forty-five minutes later, Jamie and I were splitting a bottle of Chilean red while Maggie drank full-sugar Coca-Cola. We were taking turns rating the combination of toppings on six different hand-sized homemade pizzas.

Maggie talked a mile a minute as she chewed.  

About the things she was learning in school ( _that three multiplied by seven was the same as seven multiplied by three, what a homonym was, how to create a Venn diagram, the types of clouds which she thought would be particularly interesting to me since I liked identifying shapes in the clouds, and how to write a book report_ ).

About her after-school lessons ( _French, piano, swimming_ ).  

About the new brother that she was expecting ( _announcing now that she was no longer a bairn herself, that she would_ ** _of course_** _be expected to help more_ ).  

About the paint color she had chosen when Jenny promised they could redo her room if she helped with the new nursery ( _green because she wanted a rainforest theme after learning about Brazil_ ).  

And then, just as I was taking my first sampling of the prawn and pesto pizza, a question.

“When will  _you_  have a bairn, Auntie Claire?”

I flashed a glance at Jamie who simply raised an eyebrow and continued to chew.  “Oh, well… I don’t know, Mags.  It’s a decision two adults make when they’re in love–”

“–I ken where bairns come from, Auntie Claire.  My mam told me that when a man and a wo–”

“–I dinna think that’s what she was asking,  _a nighean_ –”

“I wasn’t going to give her  _the talk_ , Jamie,” I sighed, a little exasperated as I set down my slice of pizza.  I realized then that any chivalrous streak that he had was greatly outweighed by the humor he thought he could derive from watching me squirm my way out of answering the question.   “Jamie…”

He just widened his eyes and shrugged.

“But ye  _want_  bairns, aye?” Maggie pressed on, a long line of oven-freckled white cheese stretched from her front teeth to the slice of pizza a foot away in her hand.    

“Aye, we want bairns,” Jamie said evenly. I absently plucked the prawn from the top of my pizza and pushed it aside, suddenly without any interest whatsoever in eating  _anything_.

“Thought so,” she trilled, reaching for a piece of arugula prosciutto pizza that Jamie had ranked first of six.  “Ye’d have a cute bairn, and I’d like a cousin for sure.”

My eyes didn’t leave my husband as Maggie pivoted onto her next topic ( _whether she wanted to get her ears pierced now that she was getting older_ ).  “Seriously?” I mouthed, stabbing the tines of my fork violently into the prawn and biting off a too-big chunk.  Jamie shrugged, everything about him positively  _sparkling_ as he took a long sip of his wine.  

It was shortly after midnight ( _and after a few episodes of Planet Earth accompanied by more nail varnish_ ) before Maggie made her way to bed.  Standing outside of the bedroom door, I marveled at just how  _grown up_  an eight-year-old could look. “Sleep tight.”

Assured that she was truly asleep for the night, I descended the stairs slowly. Halfway down, I paused to listen to the uneven humming of my husband filtering from the kitchen as he finished cleaning.  

“Perfect,” I heard him mumble at the sound of a cork popping free from the neck of a bottle.

Smoothing out the wrinkles in my tank top, I made my way into the living room.  He was situating two glasses, a sweating bottle of prosecco, and a bowl of cut fruit on the coffee table.

“For dessert we’re switchin’ from red to bubbles.”

“I see.”

He lit the lone candle on the table before falling into the belly of the couch and beckoning me over with a crooked finger. Settling carefully between his legs ( _still stunned into disbelief over the sight of him upright and unassisted_ ), I leaned back against his chest.  My breath was long, uneven, and somehow cleansing as he passed me a glass and draped a lazy arm over my middle.

“I didn’t have the faintest idea that you’d come through the door tonight upright, walking, and carting an eight-year-old around on your back.”

“Me neither,” he chuckled, his fingers sinking into my hair and eliciting a low, groaned “ _oh god_.”

“I mean, I knew that you were progressing, and that it was probably on the horizon, but…”  I caught on the end of my voice at my mind’s recall of the path that he had taken to get to a place of  _health_.  ( _Hospital bed.  Surgeries.  Infection.  Blood tests.  Imaging.  More surgery.  Antibiotics.  Painkillers.  Muscle relaxers.  Wheelchair.  Crutches.  Punctuated by painful physiotherapy and occupational therapy, and a grueling regimen of and at-home exercises._ )  I choked back the threatened deluge of tears, refusing to cry again when something  _good_  and  _perfect_  was  _finally_  happening.  

Instead of allowing the tears to fall, I cleared my throat and asked, “How are you  _feeling_?”

“Better than good.  Without trying to jinx it, almost back to normal.”

Hardly realizing I was about to speak, I slurred, “You’re perfect.”

“Compliments dinna help rein in my over-inflated sense of self,  _mo nighean donn_.”

“Fine,” I slurred with a sigh. “You’re  _horrible_.”

“Thanks, Sassenach,” he chuckled, hands moving down to my shoulders.

“I’m a little stunned at how cool you are with your big reveal. No hints, you’re just up on your feet.”

“I’m no’ runnin’ marathons yet, Sassenach. Dinna get too excited.”

“I’ll be as excited as I want to be,” I mumbled. “I’ll say, though, that I am also a little surprised about our dinner conversation.”

“Aye, Maggie’s still sae young to have her ears pierced.”

I reached behind me until I felt the hard plane of his stomach and pinched, hissing my discontent.  He made a manufactured, interrogative sound, and I sighed.  “I don’t want to joke about it.  I can’t. Not about  _that_.”

“Then I willna joke about it.”

I took a long, awkward sip of my wine and hummed until he took the glass from me, draining it easily.  His fingers worked back into my hair, thumbs engaged in something at the midpoint between a massage and a thorough petting.

He made a low, Scottish noise deep in his chest.  “Ye ken what I saw when I walked past the botanic garden on my way back to the office after physical therapy?”

“No, what’s that?” I tilted my chin to my chest as he worked a finger into a particularly tender spot on my neck.  He was quiet.  Almost unnaturally so.  It was as though someone had hit pause on him.  After a moment, I supplied, “What did you see on your walk?”

“Flowers.”

I opened my eyes, narrowed them, cast a glance down to the floor.   _Searching_.  I raised my eyebrows.  “ _Awesome_?”

“Aye, it’s like during winter ye forget that spring’s comin’, that winter’s no’ endless.  Ye forget what it’s like to see buds on trees and wee pink and purple and yellow blossoms rolled tight and waiting for just a wee bit of sunshine before they crack on for the spring.”

 _Spring_.  

I was barely capable of breath then, let alone words.  So I mumbled, “Uh-huh.”

The shoulder massage ceased and he moved his hand to the space between my breasts and navel.  He laid is palm flat as his thumb made a compass rose –  _north, south, east, west_.

“If ye’re ready again, I’m ready again.”

Suddenly my eyes ached and my lungs burned.  Though my head had gone entirely weightless, my hand was as heavy as a forged iron fist as it rose to rest over his. “You’re ready?”

“Aye, I’m ready.  To put a bairn in ye…” His fingers flexed.  “Right here.”

I had not realized that I could laugh like I did then, hearty and crackling.  “My uterus is in my pelvis between my bladder and rectum.”

Jamie made an exasperated noise from behind me and helped me to turn over until I was straddling him.  His hands traveled from my hips up to my waist.  Eyes wide, voice light, he laid out a not entirely unfair paraphrase of my response.  “I’m tellin’ ye that I’m ready for us to make a bairn, and ye’re telling me about where yer  _rectum_  is?”

“I am.”

“By Christ, Claire. With yer alluring statements about yer rectum I’m going to get ye  _so pregnant_.”

He brushed aside my hair, eyes searching my face as I leaned forward. The shape of his mouth changed as I came within range to kiss him – from humor to stoicism. “Ye havena said ‘yes,’ Sassenach.”

“ _Yes_ ,” I whispered, touching my lips to the corner of his mouth, feeling his lips turn up again.  “I can’t wait.”

**/END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This labor of love is owed in no small part to the people who have cheered for me in the writing process.  I owe no small debt of gratitude to the folks who have been behind the scenes on this one: @sassenachwaffles (who at one point walked away from me in a mall based on what I said to her about this story), @kkruml, @notevenjokingfic, @balfeheughlywed, @thefraserwitch, @holdhertightandsayhername, and @kalendraashtar. This site is teeming with talent, and you’re all evidence of that.  You make me a better writer even when I don’t want to be one.


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